I’ve been reviewing pitch decks for years and years now. Let’s cut to the chase and tell you what my five favorite pitch decks are. Some might say that the Airbnb pitch deck is great. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, but it’s just interesting how a company that is creative in terms of technology raised that amount of money, and in a different way. When it comes to startups, it started a pitch deck revolution and became an example of what a pitch deck is, but that’s far from my top five best pitch decks of all time.
1. WeWork
Controversially, I would say WeWork. If you check their website, you’ll find their investor decks. Although WeWork is a public company, so you can’t really put it as a startup pitch deck, it’s more like a growth pitch deck.
They pitched a product that convinced the world that they were in the right direction for a very long time until they announced bankruptcy or had problems with it. So the job with the pitch deck was perfectly done well.
The design is amazing, and the statistical analysis in it is quite good. This is one of my favorite pitch decks as it gives the feel of professionalism, and at the same time, it shows that the company is all about business and work. It didn’t work out eventually, but that’s not the objective of the pitch deck. It’s not the best pitch deck of all time, but it’s definitely something to learn from.
2. Fiverr
Secondly, Fiverr always releases investor presentations every quarter, and their investor presentations are extremely well-designed. For the design element of them, I would say they’re one of my favorite pitch decks because they’re simply designed, they’re clean, and they show how strong their company is compared to others.
Also, Fiverr is a public company, so you can’t really think of it again as a startup, but you can learn from their design how to incorporate an investor presentation that looks like that. For that reason, I do consider the deck one of the best pitch decks of all time.
3. Perplexity
Third, Perplexity. Perplexity is a startup that’s trying to compete with Google. What I like about their pitch deck is that, frankly, it’s very simple and straightforward and pitches a problem in an innovative way, which is pitching the actual problem, and that’s it.
Search has always been a problem, and when I saw their pitch deck, I was very convinced that they were going to raise a lot of money because it is true that search nowadays is full of advertisements. So they hit the perfect problem, and they knew they did that. They just made a very simple pitch deck in this sense.
4. Mistral
Then there is the company called Mistral. The pitch deck of theirs is different because it’s an investment memo. It’s simply a short document that is not in a landscape format, and it is just stating what the company’s intending to do.
Sometimes the best idea of a pitch deck is to just simply state how it should be done and what the problem with it is in the market, and they’re not stating that they’re going to be better than everyone else in the world. On the contrary, they’re just saying they’re developing a product that is perfect for a suitable market. This is a pitch deck or an investment memo to learn from.
5. Airbnb and Uber – The benchmark of the best pitch decks of all time
Finally, I would put in the last category all the companies that include Airbnb and Uber-like pitch decks. Those are definitely a couple of the best pitch decks of all time.
Both of those companies created pitch decks that are quite decent. Of course, that was a very long time ago, yet still, they kind of created a startup revolution when it comes to marketplaces or third-party middlemen startups, similar to how Uber connects users to drivers and how Airbnb connects homeowners to actual home visitors per se.
They created a revolution because what’s pictureable is their market. Their market is unbelievable. The readers of those pitch decks didn’t believe that Airbnb had such a market, but look at them now. They’re both public companies with a lot of market capitalization or valuation, and that’s what a pitch deck is. A pitch throws out an idea, and if people believe in it, then they get rewarded in the long term.