Your Pitch Deck Isn't Enough

Troy Kirwin's guide to one of the most underused fundraising tools: investment memos

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Most founders think fundraising is about selling investors on their vision. I believe it’s not. It’s about making it easy for an investor to say yes.

Here’s some inside baseball: unless you are pitching a solo GP, it’s often not enough for the investor you’re talking to to fall in love with the opportunity. They have to convince the rest of their team to love it too.

This requires writing an internal investment committee memo that translates your story into a case for why the fund should wire you millions of dollars. And they’re doing this for dozens of deals simultaneously, while fielding new pitches, managing portfolio companies, and trying to leave the office before 9pm.

So when it comes down to two promising companies and one evening to write an IC memo, which deal moves forward? The one where the partner has a five-page written document in the founder’s own words? Or the one where they have to reconstruct the narrative from a six-slide deck and some scribbled notes from the week before?

I’ve observed this dynamic play out dozens of times. The decision to bring a company into an investment committee meeting sometimes has less to do with level of conviction and more to do with whether the investor has time to do proper due diligence to write a complete memo. That might sound cynical but it’s reality in a world governed by tradeoffs.

I’ve personally had teams come in where, honestly, I was lukewarm based on the deck. Maybe they were deeply technical and not natural communicators. But when I read their memo, I could see the depth of thinking. The level of rigor changed my read on the entire company.

To put it simply, a great memo helps an investor more accurately price your potential.

And beyond the utility for fundraising, it’s a useful exercise for you, too. The discipline of writing in full prose and structuring your thinking on paper forces a level of clarity that high level bullet points on slides simply don’t require.

This is why every founder I work with at speedrun now writes an investment memo. I think you should write them too.

So what does a great memo look like?

What Goes in the Memo

What follows is a template that I share with every founder I work with.

One-Liner

Your company in a sentence. This should be crisp enough that someone can repeat it from memory to a colleague. In the earliest stages saying something like “We are the X for Y” e.g. “We are the Cursor for Sales” is totally fine. As you get deeper into your journey you’ll want to abandon that framing.

Team Overview

This is the section investors flip to first and your most important one, so you might as well put it in the front. Before they read anything about your market or your product, they want to know who’s building this and why they should care.

Include founder backgrounds with enough detail that an investor can quickly assess relevant experience. What notable things have you accomplished to date? What makes you exceptional? What have you gone 0 to 1 on? If you have a social following, mention it. It can eventually help for distribution. Outline the broader team if applicable, and if you have impressive or relevant advisors, include them.

The core question you’re answering is why is this the right team to win in this market?

Side note: you should hyperlink your Linkedin to your name. The first thing investors want to do when they come across a new opportunity is to pop open their profile to see if they have mutual connections and can therefore reference the team. I know that hyperlinking seems like a silly thing to make sure to do, investors do have opposable thumbs and can type into a search bar, but a quality memo is built by a hundred tiny touches.

Problem and Market Overview

What is the problem, and how big is it? Keep this concrete. Avoid hand-wavy TAM calculations as these are always bullshit. If you can, frame the problem through tangible examples. One memo I got recently did this right by starting with, “sales people at a distributor spend 50% of their time slicing through the messy inbox problem and manually inputting data into a legacy system to generate a quote.” Another option is analogies from spaces with similar root problems (“we’re Tennr for Distributors”) an investor can relate to. This is much better than dubious TAM figures. The best problem statements make the reader think “of course someone should solve this.”

Product Overview

What does the product actually do, and what is your clear wedge into the market you’re attacking? This section is also where the “why now” belongs. What has changed, whether in technology, regulation, behavior, or market structure, that makes this the moment to build a hundred-billion dollar company? Any good idea has likely been tried before, so identifying the current tailwinds is essential.

GTM Strategy

Who is your ideal customer, and how are you getting in front of them? If you have any unique distribution advantages, unfair access to customers, community-driven growth, partnerships, whatever it is, this is where you make that case. Investors want to know you’ve thought about how this thing actually gets sold, not just built.

Business Model

How will you make money? If it’s going to evolve over time as you move upmarket or add product tiers, describe that evolution. Keep it simple but be specific.

Even if you’re early and haven’t fully validated your pricing model with customers yet, demonstrating that you have a working theory here substantiates that you’re building a venture scaled business and not just a cool product.

Traction

This section will vary enormously depending on your stage. At pre-seed, you may only have design partners or letters of intent. At seed, you might have real revenue. At Series A, you should have retention and expansion data.

A few things to include if you have them: an overview of design partners or marquee logos, what they’re paying now and what they could be worth at scale, and whether contracts represent actual billed ARR or contractual commitments not yet billed.

A pet peeve of mine, that’s worth flagging: Do not refer to non-recurring revenue as Annual Recurring Revenue. If your revenue is predictable but not contractually recurring, call it Annualized Run-Rate Revenue and spell that out. If investors think you’re being deceptive with this label, it will break trust.

If you have the data, include monthly revenue charts and monthly customer counts to show acquisition growth and momentum (note: if you don’t show a chart, investors may assume that the growth isn’t great). The other important charts to include are logo retention by cohort and net dollar retention. The a16z blog has excellent breakdowns of the key metrics for both B2B and consumer/prosumer businesses. Include those metrics. Investors know them, and showing you know them too signals sophistication.

If you’re a Series A/B company you may be able to drop in a chart that is going up and to the right to signal that “it’s working” and that you have PMF. Before then, traction can be more about signals (“we’re in a late stage paid pilot with Enterprise Customer A with the opportunity to expand across the entire org”) than raw numbers. Being able to properly contextualize your early traction becomes one of the most important ways that memos trump decks. Use that to your advantage.

Competitive Landscape

Who else is in this market, and why are you going to win? What’s your unique advantage? Investors don’t expect you to have zero competition because great markets attract many great founders. They expect you to have done your research on the competition and have a credible theory for why you’re differentiated.

Vision

What’s the five-year picture? How does the market evolve, and how does your company evolve with it?

Once you’ve penetrated the market with your thin wedge, what is your plan to expand the product surface area and dominate the category? This section is your line of defense when an investor believes your initial product has a limited TAM or is more of a feature than a full product. You should identify how owning your wedge gives you the right to win the category. So if you were building software that will eventually replace ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems you could defend it with something like, “by building the ‘system of action’ with agents above an ERP we can eventually build and replace the ERP.”

This is your chance to show the investor the larger arc of your vision: the insight that turns a useful product into a large and important company.

Next 12 Month Plan and Use of Proceeds

Lay out what you plan to accomplish with the capital you’re raising. Where will it go? What milestones will it unlock?

I would offer one piece of counterintuitive advice: do not put the specific amount you plan to raise in the memo. That should be a live discussion. Writing it down anchors the conversation in a way that can work against you.

When a Memo Matters Most (and When It Doesn’t)

Not every company benefits equally from a memo. I believe the highest-leverage scenarios are:

Contrarian or obscure markets. If you’re building vertical AI for lumber distributors or rail operators or food distribution, the investor probably doesn’t already know your market. They need to be educated on why this is bigger or more interesting than it looks. A memo lets you do that in a way slides can’t.

Technical teams who aren’t natural communicators. Some of the best founders I work with are deeply technical. In a quick intro call, they may not shine. But when they can lay out their thinking in written form, you can see the rigor. The memo becomes the great equalizer between business and technical founders.

Post-meeting follow-ups where the investor is on the fence. If someone is deciding whether to take a second meeting or bring you into their process, having a written document that answers the obvious follow-up questions can tip the balance.

Where a memo matters less: if you’re building in a well-known, fast-moving market like AI Video editing, every informed investor already knows the space. A five-page market breakdown is going to be out of date in three months. In those cases, the memo should lean heavily on team and traction, not market education. Don’t write pages about a market the investor already understands.

The Deck and the Memo Are Not Mutually Exclusive

This isn’t an either/or. You should have both, and they serve different purposes at different moments in the fundraising process.

The teaser deck is your ticket to the meeting. It gets shared before the first call. Its job is to answer two questions for the investor at a thumbnail level: Is this an interesting team? And is this a market I care about? That’s it. It can be five or six slides and skimmable. It should not try to do more than this.

The memo is what you share after the initial meeting. Its job is to capture everything the investor might have missed, provide depth on the market and the strategy, serve as an FAQ, and demonstrate the quality of your thinking. The deck is the teaser. The memo is the substance. And now that tools like Gamma exist, you can actually write the memo first and generate the teaser deck from it. Write the substance, then extract the thumbnail. That’s a better workflow than the other way around.

The goal isn’t to be exhaustive with your materials. It’s to answer the critical questions and get to the next meeting.

A Few More Tactical Notes

On length: One important caution. Particularly at the pre-seed stage, don’t say so much that you give the investor enough rope to hang you. The goal is to answer the critical questions and get to the next meeting. At pre-seed, aim for three pages and make it mostly about team and market opportunity. At seed, five is a good ceiling. Even at Series A, anything beyond eight or ten pages is probably too long. If it feels too long, it probably is. Say just enough. Not more.

When your memo is too long investors may throw it into ChatGPT and ask for a summary. I’ve done this. Many investors I know have done this. So you might as well write something tight enough that it doesn’t need to be compressed by a language model to be useful.

More excitingly, AI is to change what an investment memo can be: One founder recently sent me a long FAQ document along with a system prompt and told me to put both into Claude. The system prompt would generate a memo from the FAQ, and then the investor could ask follow-up questions based on all the source material. I’m not sure I’d recommend this as your primary approach, but it was creative, and it points to a real truth: investors can use AI to process your materials whether you design for that or not.

On writing the memo even if you don’t “need” one: Even if you are one of the select few founders who can raise without written materials, the act of writing the memo is still valuable. It forces you to structure your thinking, identify the weak points in your narrative, and articulate things you may have only ever talked about out loud. Many founders tell me the writing process changed how they thought about their own company. Further, even if you can raise on just your name, if your investors do not deeply understand your vision and direction, it can be harder for them to actually help you build.

The Case for Substance

Long-form is back. Investors want substance. The best founders I work with understand that a well-written document in their own voice is one of the highest-leverage things they can produce during a fundraise. It can be the difference between an investor who’s interested and an investor who falls in love.

Write the memo. Make it easy for people to say yes.

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