This seemingly minor detail can make or break your raise

A vicious knife fight recently broke out on LinkedIn. A startup founder urged other founders to send their pitch deck to investors only by DocSend, Papermark, or similar link.

Many investors replied that if they didn’t receive the deck as a PDF, it went straight into the trash. Accusations and recriminations ensued.

This seemingly minor detail is telling. It highlights the depths of mutual misunderstanding between founders and investors that leads to so much frustration in both camps. More importantly, which way you choose to send your pitch deck will affect your ability to raise a round.

Having been both a startup founder hunting for investors and an angel investor overwhelmed with irrelevant pitches, let me explain the concerns of both sides and provide my recommendation (the only recommendation you should listen to.)

Investors: Here is Why Founders Want to Send a Link to Their Deck

When I’m working on my raise, I’m sending out the deck to a hundred people at a time. Who opened it, who read it, who looked at it again — I need to know. I have to focus my time on the 10 people who were interested, and not bug the other 90 with pointless and annoying follow ups.

Second, my deck is being updated daily with feedback and to add the latest impressive milestones. I want to make sure that investors are looking at the current version, not an older (and frankly embarrassing) edition from two months ago.

But third, and most important, I don’t want the deck circulating without my knowledge and permission. We have a great idea that will fix a significant problem, but the product isn’t finished and we don’t have our patents yet. I can’t have the deck ending up in the hands of a potential competitor that could beat us to the punch. Though I’ve covered every slide with “CONFIDENTIAL DO NOT FORWARD”, some of you jerks will forward it anyway without even asking.

A simple link to the current version of the pitch deck in the cloud is easier for you, and simpler and safer for me. Other than the cost of a DocSend subscription, is there any reason to be sending out PDFs like we’re still in the 1990’s?

Founders: Here is Why Investors Want a PDF

First, dear founders, please understand that 95% of the decks that land in my in-box are irrelevant to me. I invest in ClimateTech where I have some expertise. Everything else, I ought to delete, but I usually open anyway. Occasionally, something sparks my interest or I have some free, unsolicited advice to offer. More often, it looks like a good fit for one of my angel groups and I’m happy to advise you to apply.

Inevitably, though, if I’ve opened the link, you follow up. Not once but five times. Even after I reply that it’s not a fit for me, I’m on your mailing list. Every month, you spam me with big news or send me daily notices that the round is closing and I’d better get in now before it’s too late.

The only answer, and what most investors do, is to never, ever open a DocSend link from a cold outreach. If your deck requires entering an email address to view, most investors will ignore it. Perhaps you won’t be one of those obnoxious startup spammers, but opening a link from a founder is as dangerous as one from the widow of the oil minister of Nigeria. Better to just hit delete.

More importantly, young founders, sending me a link misunderstands how I invest.

You probably have this vague idea that you’ll send me a deck and if I’m interested, we’ll have a call where I’ll ask a few questions and then write a check. Perhaps that happened during the Covid bubble when a lot of dumb money got thrown at a lot of dumb ideas, but those days are gone and you’re back to dealing with serious investors.

Once in a while, a pitch lands in my in-box that’s in one of my areas of interest. But there’s no way I can evaluate a company’s technology, market, patents, and competitive situation alone. So I forward it to relevant friends and colleagues to get their input.

For a startup working on a new battery chemistry, for example, I’ll forward the deck to my friend with a PhD in electrochemistry to tell me if the technology is feasible and the likely challenges. I’ll forward it to another friend who works at the Dept. of Energy and knows everyone working on similar and competing ideas. I’ll send it to a friend who works in the battery group at Tesla to see if it’s something she’d want to look at now or in the future. In other words, I build a network of advisors.

I know you want to spend an hour pitching me before I talk to anyone, but that’s a waste of your time and mine. Before conferring with my friends, I don’t even know what concerns I should have and what questions to ask.

Yes, I see the “do not forward” footer on every page, but you sent it to me cold. You want me to look at it and consider it for investment, which to me means you sent it to my team for our review and internal discussion.

When you send a pdf deck, I forward it to the people I need to talk to. When you send a link, if my colleagues can even open it, you’ll bug them asking if they’re interesting in investing when they were only doing me a favor. So I don’t forward links. If that’s your goal, it succeeded.

But if I don’t confer with my team of experts, I’m flying blind. And that means I’m not investing.

What Should You Do?

Should you send a deck as a pdf or a link? The answer depends on your priorities.

If security and control are critical, and these are valid concerns, send a link. That will limit the distribution of your deck to those people you’ve authorized.

If your priority is to find funding as quickly and easily as possible, send a pdf version of the deck. If there’s secret sauce that could destroy your business if it lands in a competitor’s hands, that doesn’t belong in a pitch deck anyway.

By sending a pdf, not only will you reach investors like me, but as I bring your startup to others in my network, they may invest, too, or perhaps become customers.

But the choice is yours. Whichever you choose, make sure you understand the tradeoffs and choose wisely.

The Silicon Valley startup, SüprDüpr, has invented teleportation. (Yes, teleportation! Like traveling from San Francisco to New York in the blink of an eye.) With obvious military uses, the Russian and Chinese governments want to steal the technology, so only the CEO has access to the prototype. But is the company’s extreme security truly necessary, or is the founder using it to cover up the murder of one of the employees? Find out in the award-winning Silicon Valley mystery novel, To Kill a Unicorn. 4.8 stars on Amazon.