CommandBar, a B2B tool designed to make software easier to use, closed a $4.8M raise in 2021 with one of the most intensely minimalistic decks I’ve ever seen. The deck is only seven slides long and a ton of very important information is missing, but that didn’t stop Thrive Capital and Y Combinator from opening their checkbooks.
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It slides into this deck
- Cover transparency
- Product transparency
- Slideshow (with link to Loom demo)
- Thesis slide
- Problem/competitive landscape transparency
- Value proposition transparency
- Group transparency
Three things to love
In a fairly thin field, there are a few innovations worth highlighting.
Information design, not graphic design
I have long argued that design is far less important than people seem to think when it comes to early stage pools. This makes sense: The primary purpose of a pitch is to communicate the startup’s capabilities to potential investors. These elements are fundamentally rooted in the content and clarity of the message rather than the aesthetics of the presentation.
That’s not to say that design isn’t important, but startups would do well to pay attention to information design (ie, whether the content is easy to absorb and read), rather than graphic design. Early stage investors focus primarily on substance rather than style. They are looking for exciting business ideas with strong market potential and teams capable of bringing those ideas to life.
Too much focus on design can often misallocate valuable early-stage resources. Startups typically operate under tight budget constraints, and spending significant time and money on pitch deck design may not be the best use of limited resources. Time and effort could be better spent validating the business idea, conducting market research, and improving the product or service. If you have a talented designer on staff, by all means, let them loose on the deck, but be aware that great pitch deck design is a highly specialized niche in itself, and other design disciplines may not be as transferable as you think.
The CommandBar overrides this, essentially not drawing the deck at all. In doing so, the company created a tough, easy-to-consume slide deck.
[Slide 1] How’s that for minimalism. Image credits: CommandBar
If you’re at revision 900 of your pitch deck and can’t get the design quite right, maybe less is more.
Elegant combination of problems and competitive landscape
In my many years of playing pitch decks, I can’t say I’ve ever seen the problem go hand in hand with competitive transparency, but in this case, it just works:
[Slide 5] These go well together. Image credits: CommandBar
Startup founders are always looking for ways to make their pitch deck stand out to potential investors. In this case, CommandBar created a new concept by merging the competitive landscape and problem slides.
Yes, the design is utilitarian, but the combination of the two slides sharpens the presentation and helps to do something unusual: It shows company information coherently deep understanding of the market and the unique value of the solution.
The most effective part of this slide is that it shows that CommandBar can understand some really huge markets. The company doesn’t have a market size slide (boo!), but the examples on this slide give us an idea: WalkMe has a market cap of $830 million. According to PitchBook data, Zendesk last raised a $10 billion valuation. As of the last investment round, Intercom and FullStory were valued by investors at $900 million and $1.8 billion, respectively. Back-of-a-pkin math says CommandBar is chasing a market of at least $13 billion. Not too shabby.
I want to emphasize that while incorporating these slides offers some advantages, clarity is key. Make sure the slide is not overloaded with information. The goal is to enhance understanding and engagement, not confusion. Careful planning and content selection is crucial to making this strategy work — and remember that more and more VCs are using AI to read pitch decks to make first screenings. My own AI-based pitch deck tool was confused by this slide, misidentifying it as a client slide. Your mileage may vary, but your pitch deck should be machine readable.
Simplicity
Many founders get confused trying to articulate what the company does and who it does it for. This makes sense: From course a startup is complex and full of nuances. But investors don’t need that level of precision in the weed, especially not the first time they’re looking at a startup. The second slide of the CommandBar reduces the temptation of complexity by offering the following:
[Slide 2] Distill your purpose in as few words as possible. Image credits: CommandBar
It’s unusual for a product-based promotion to work well, but here again CommandBar is different. Being a “search-based interface for interacting with software” explains it whatand enabling “web apps for command line configuration” explains it how. “Leveling up their UX” shows why CommandBar can benefit companies. This is great and shows that the founders really understand the CommandBar Why.
Three things that could be improved
Smart innovations aside, there’s a lot to like with this deck.
The team slide has no team
[Slide 7] Where is the team? Image credits: CommandBar
Princeton, McKinsey, Bain Capital, AngelList are all impressive, but nothing in this slide suggests why CommandBar’s founding team is the best team to run this company. And that’s not all. the team slide is often the most important slide in a deck. It should highlight the team’s deep experience, connections, or anything else that gives that particular startup a competitive advantage.
Missing information
The deck doesn’t include enough information to know if it’s enterprise scale. There is no real sense of how big the market is. No request or use of funds. The team is missing. There is no financial plan, no business model and no marketing plan. There is no clear pricing or financial unit. There is no clarity about who the target customers are, how this company might be able to defend itself, or why now is the right time to start the company.
Image Credits: Haje Kamps
For reference, the AI-powered pitch deck tool gave this deck a 16.9% chance of raising funding.
You need traction
The CommandBar deck has no real grip metrics, which isn’t great. Even if there is no revenue, at least some work has been done to de-risk the company. That’s the attraction. report it and show it as graphs.
So what happened?
It’s possible that CommandBar raised its round with no deck at all, and that investors entered the field knowing more about the company than we see here. Maybe the team is great and the investors knew this because they invested in a previous company or had exposure to the founders in the past. Maybe the company did an exciting demo when they were at Y Combinator.
I asked the founding team about what really happened.
“Vinay, Richard and I are overthinkers, so before we wrote our seed deck we created some principles,” said CommandBar CEO and co-founder James Evans. The company took an unusual tactic: “We looked at our seed deck as a note to ourselves about why we — self-proclaimed smart people who could be doing a lot of other things with our time — should be investing in the next decade+ of blood and our sweat and tears in this company. If that was clear and we could reasonably convince ourselves, getting that message out to raise capital would be easy. And if it wasn’t. . . then why were we wasting time trying to raise money for this company in the first place?’
Evans actually toppled the company’s deck himself in a recent blog post, which makes a good behind the scenes read (I hadn’t read it before writing my teardown above). He told me that while the company may or may not be raising another round of funding (shhh), it did raise its next round with no decks, saying it “wasn’t a traditional process.”
“We drove A because of the continuation of the factors that were present at seed — a team with great ambition + clear thinking and a product that customers loved and you could see becoming ubiquitous,” said Itai Tsiddon, when TechCrunch asked him how the Series A round came together. “Impressive early customer traction, with some logos, certainly helped!”
The full field
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