How to create the perfect team slide

Join 500+ founders, get weekly fundraising insights, and access free fundraising resources including a library of 30+ pitchdeck examples.

Welcome to the second lesson in this section of the module. In the previous lesson we learnt how to incorporate information about your team in your outreach emails to investors, in this one we’ll be focusing on the pitch deck. By the end of this lesson, you’ll know what content to prioritise in team slides and why.

Let’s start.

When creating a pitch deck, knowing where to put the information about your team is trivial – any good deck should have a dedicated team slide. On the other hand, deciding what information to fill this slide with is more of a challenge.

Just like with blurbs, VCs primarily use your deck as a way to figure out whether or not to take a call with you. However, unfortunately for founders, VCs skim through decks – the average investor spends only two minutes reading each presentation. This means that, while you have slightly more space than in a blurb, your team slide still needs to be punchy.

Given these space constraints, your primary goal remains the same. Your main mission is to get VCs excited enough about your team to take a call with you.

When it comes to choosing what to put in your slide to achieve this, the principles are identical to those we discussed when talking about blurbs. The most efficient way to get VCs excited by your team, is still to show them your key team members and:

  1. Make their backgrounds sound as impressive as possible
  2. Highlight their domain expertise

However, when doing this in slide form, you have a few extra tools at your disposal.

Firstly you have more space, giving you the room to mention more than one impressive thing per employee.

Secondly, slides are visual – which means you can include the logos of places where your team members used to work or study. This allows you to ensure that even a VC who’s skimming through your deck realizes that your team members came from a combination of Facebook, Netflix and Spotify and gives you credit for it.

And lastly, slides have these amazing things called titles. Titles are really helpful because you can use them to shape how investors interpret the rest of the information contained in the slide. If you want VCs to know that you’re all domain experts, or that you have a “unique combination of AI talent, sales experience and logistics knowhow”, you can use the slide title to literally tell them.

3-step guide

Now that you know what details to include as well as the tools at your disposal, it, once again, becomes a question of structuring this information. So to help you, here’s a step by step guide to making team slides.

Step #1 – Decide which team members you want to talk about
If you aren't sure who to pick, read this.

Step #2 – Dedicate a portion of the slide to each team member
Divide the space under the title into equally sized sections and in each one:

  • Include the chosen person’s picture, name, and role.
  • Add the logos of the organisations they’re associated with – the more prestigious the better
  • Use up to three bullet points to make them sound amazing / showcase their domain expertise

If you’re looking for inspiration on what to put in your bullets points, see here for detailed guidance on what impresses VC, and here for a deep dive on domain expertise.

Step #3 – Use the slide title to emphasize the conclusion you want VCs to make about your team
As we mentioned above, titles are a great way to guide investors on how to interpret the information a slide contains. So, instead of just writing “Team”, use your title to tell VCs how they should view the team as a whole. To illustrate this, here are two example titles:

  • “We’re a team of domain experts trying to solve a problem we had in our previous roles.”
  • “Our team’s unique combination of skills and experience makes us perfectly suited to building software for insurers.”

Example slide

So you can see what the results of this three-step process should look like, here’s an example slide made by following the instructions above. As you look at it, see if you can spot the elements from the checklist.

Screenshot of an example of a team

Conclusion

That wraps up our lesson on incorporating your team into your pitch deck. We've explored how to use slide titles, visuals and the extra space that slides provide to make your team appear more attractive to VCs. By following the step by step guide in this lesson, you should be able to craft a team slide that excites VCs enough to take a meeting with you.

In our next lesson, we'll dive into how to make your team as compelling as possible during actual investor meetings.

Join 500+ founders, get weekly fundraising insights, and access free fundraising resources including a library of 30+ pitchdeck examples.