How I evaluated 800+ decks
The exact criteria the AI uses — drawn from a year of weekly deal reviews, not generic startup advice.
This is the exact framework I used to evaluate 800+ pitch decks during my year at Plug and Play Tech Center, one of the world's most active startup accelerators. Everything below is what I learned from weekly partner meetings, deal reviews, and pattern-matching across hundreds of decks — not generic advice you can Google. This is what the AI uses to evaluate your deck.
1Team
Team is the single most important criterion for funding — above product, above market, above traction.
The core question: can I find these people online, and does what I find match what they're claiming?
Discoverability
Every founder needs to be easily searchable — LinkedIn, GitHub, a personal site, publications, anything that lets me verify who they are and what they've done. If I can't find a founder with a quick search, that's an immediate yellow flag. The more I can read into the founding team from public sources, the better. Include links in your deck; it removes friction and signals confidence.
Complementarity
The best teams have founders whose skills don't overlap — typically a technical co-founder paired with a business or domain-expert co-founder. A team of all engineers or all business people raises questions about execution range.
Full-time commitment
It's fine — and common — for founders to still be employed or studying at the start of the journey. What matters is the plan: if the funding round will allow them to go full-time, that's a reasonable answer. What I look for is that the founders have a clear, credible path to full commitment, not that they already are.
2Competition
There will always be competitors. Pretending otherwise destroys credibility.
Include a competitors slide — and make it accurate. The goal isn't to prove you have no competition; it's to show you understand the landscape and know specifically why you win.
Too little competition isn't always a green flag — it can mean the market doesn't exist yet or that smarter players already tried and failed.
Too much competition signals a crowded space where differentiation is hard and margins get squeezed.
The sweet spot is a clear competitive landscape where your positioning is defensible and specific.
What I want to see: a competitors slide that doesn't hide the real players, a clear axis of differentiation, and a convincing answer to "why you, why now."
3Deck Basics
Make it easy to keep reading
Include your website URL in the deck. It sounds small, but it signals that you're ready for scrutiny — and it removes the friction for anyone who wants to dig deeper immediately. A missing or broken website link is a subtle but real confidence knock.
More sections coming as the playbook grows.
Last updated: June 2026