 Sixty seconds of pitch. Ninety seconds of demo. Then conversation. Slides are the rookie move. by Sephi Shapira The Fundable Founder is a blunt field guide for startup CEOs who want to raise capital on their terms. Every week you’ll get founder-first tactics on mindset, method, and investor dynamics, drawn from decades of hard lessons in the fundraising trenches. No theory. Just sharp insight to make you fundable. Read the entire post here. --- The URL for this post. Hong Kong Airport, Fifteen Minutes The CEO had taken seventeen pitch meetings. His Series A funds were dwindling. The lead investor had told him the round wasn't going to close. The team was stressed. The CFO was modeling shutdown costs. One last shot. A meeting in a Hong Kong airport coffee shop with the managing partner of what would become the largest venture capital firm in the world. Fifteen minutes, between flights, no time for a deck. The CEO sat down. Sixty seconds of company description. Ninety seconds of demo on his phone. He paused for discussion. The partner asked about deal terms. Ten minutes later, they had agreed on valuation and amount. Handshake. The partner caught his flight. Forty five days later the round closed. The fund became Softbank's check on his Series B. No deck. No formal pitch. No Q&A theater. That meeting rewrote how he raised capital from then on. Here's the structure that made it work and the discipline behind it.  1. Slides Make You Boring
Old: Investors expect a pitch deck. Polish it.New: Investors see hundreds of pitch decks a year. Don't be one of them. Every founder pitches with slides. The format is so universal it doesn't register as a choice. Investors sit through deck after deck, watching founders read off bullet points the investor could read faster on their own. The format trains both sides into a kind of mutual fatigue. Pitching without a deck is unconventional in a market that rewards being unconventional. The investor is paying attention from the first sentence because the format itself is a surprise. The founder gets to perform their own conviction instead of hiding behind a slide. This isn't gimmickry. It's signal. Founders who can carry a meeting without a deck demonstrate three things: they know their business cold, they can read a room, and they trust themselves under pressure. All three are exactly what investors are screening for. Investor screen: Can this founder hold the room without a crutch? Fundable move: Pitch your next investor without slides. If you can't, you don't yet know your business well enough to fundraise. 2. The Three Minute Structure Old: Twenty minute presentation. Forty minute Q&A.New: One minute pitch. Two minute demo. Then conversation. The structure that closed the airport meeting: Sixty seconds: what you do, your traction, the opportunity. One sentence each. Compressed, specific, no warm up. Ninety seconds: a demo or a specific scene. Show the customer feeling the need. Show the moment your product addresses it. Tension and release. Then stop. Open the floor for the investor's questions. This structure does work most pitches don't. It primes the investor by stating intent ("I'll only need three minutes"). It builds trust by following through. It surfaces investor concerns immediately so the conversation can address what's real, not what the founder assumed mattered. Most investors smirk when you announce a three minute pitch. Then they're impressed when you deliver one. The contrast itself shifts the read. Investor screen: Can this founder operate with discipline I can feel? Fundable move: Time yourself. Sixty seconds for the pitch, ninety for the demo. If you can't compress to that, the investor won't follow you when you need them to. 3. Prepare the Five Follow-Ups Old: Wing the Q&A.New: Pre-script sixty-second answers to the five questions every investor asks. After the three-minute opening, every Q&A converges on the same five topics: team, technology, marketing, business model, funding status. The questions vary in phrasing. The underlying topics don't. Founders who haven't pre-scripted these answers waste time finding the right framing in the moment. The investor watches them search. The investor reads it as ambiguity about the company. Founders who have pre-scripted sixty-second answers sound prepared without sounding rehearsed. The answers contain the right specifics, hit the right beats, and end at the right time. The investor walks away thinking the founder knows their business cold. This is one hour of work that compounds across every meeting in your fundraise. Investor screen: Has this founder prepared, or are they making it up live? Fundable move: Write sixty-second answers to all five topics this week. Practice each three times out loud. Then use them. Read the rest of this article here.
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