# Why founders should never use AI-generated pitch decks > Source: > Published: 2026-08-19 04:30:00+00:00 I start my work weeks with deck reviews. Every Monday morning, in advance of our weekly fund meeting, I look at all the decks that entrepreneurs submitted through our website in the past week. Every deck gets a rating: “Yes!” means we should definitely take a meeting with the founders. “Maybe” means we should discuss first. “Too early” means we like the team and should watch their progress. “No” means, well, no. I am not a career VC. I was a founder and operator (read: held different jobs in tech) long before I ever made an investment. My journey to VC was heavily driven by a desire to open the heavy gates of venture to outsiders, misfits and mold-breakers like me. From the get-go, I promised myself I would give every entrepreneur a chance, whether they came highly recommended by an insider, or they came in cold through the “[Pitch Us](https://df1a7d4a.streak-link.com/DAM6EyibG8nGDTIDlgahvTG8/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fredirect%2F79972eff-4ae0-4b0d-a924-510623a8c099%3Fj%3DeyJ1IjoiMXowNjFtIn0.v1E5SETk_RNcHlNPWO84rqvb_PPqMbmeLf_yr3OCPRM)” link on the website. Which is why, every single Monday for the last five years, I’ve started my week looking at decks. We get anywhere from a dozen to a hundred in a week. My colleague David and I look at every single one. Our goal is *not* to learn everything about the startup in one sitting—our only goal is to decide whether we should meet them. Inevitably, after the first few decks, it gets monotonous. It’s like grading papers— everything starts blurring together, even as I try very hard to focus and honor every deck with my attention. I wish this weren’t the case, but the fact is, the quality of these decks and the opportunity they are pitching varies broadly. The honest truth is that this part of the job can be a bit of a slog. Lately, it’s not a slog. It’s downright unbearable. You think LinkedIn is bad these days? Try sifting through three dozen [AI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence)-made pitch decks [to start your week](https://df1a7d4a.streak-link.com/DAM6EyyVlYPcA4eYiQlX5oK4/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fredirect%2F95eaf23e-0d8a-4ccd-abe7-ba2c1755eba3%3Fj%3DeyJ1IjoiMXowNjFtIn0.v1E5SETk_RNcHlNPWO84rqvb_PPqMbmeLf_yr3OCPRM). A sea of sameness packed with buzzwords that say nothing. How do I know they’re made by AI? For one thing, they’re visually perfect—but that’s not the problem. The problem is they all have the same slides and are full of the same literary mannerisms you see on social media. And the slide titles: Always fragments. Never sentences. (See what I did there?) To be clear: I applaud entrepreneurs who use AI for things like research, to automate grunt work, polish their materials, and scale themselves. I do take issue with those who use AI to do the thinking and communicating for them. As an early-stage VC, an opportunity is only as special as the founder or founding team that’s leading it. If that founder can’t think for themselves … at a minimum, that’s just not very special at all. At this point, you might argue, “Of course I’m thinking for myself! These are all my ideas! I just put them in prompts because VCs expect a perfect pitch deck and I don’t have time to make it perfect.” To which I would say: Whining gets you nowhere. First of all, while fancy graphics are nice, standout decks don’t need to be fancy—they need to be effective. McKinsey famously uses plain sans-serif font and a strict, minimalist approach to color for all their client work. When it comes to graphic design, a deck needs to be clean, not professionally designed. Not to mention—if you really hate making decks, you could write a short memo instead. Zero graphic design needed. Speaking of McKinsey: I worked there for a hot minute earlier in my career, followed by a stint at a boutique strategy consulting firm founded by [Clay Christensen](https://df1a7d4a.streak-link.com/DAM6EyqDgw60BqgVHAlqWx9l/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fredirect%2Fe8a5dbf4-147a-47cd-9ebe-183f512fbbb0%3Fj%3DeyJ1IjoiMXowNjFtIn0.v1E5SETk_RNcHlNPWO84rqvb_PPqMbmeLf_yr3OCPRM). It is no exaggeration to say that I spent that entire chunk of my life creating and perfecting decks. Every new client project was three months of “996” working on a single deliverable, inevitably a deck. We would agonize over every message and every image on every slide, and order and reorder those slides ad nauseum. Those decks were the bane of my existence. I had nightmares about them—still do! For a long time I questioned what was the point of the damn thing. I could hardly believe that clients were paying us so much money to make a friggin’ PowerPoint. Of course, they *weren’t* paying us for a deck. They were paying us to analyze a business problem and find the best possible solution. And we did that by building a storyline, breaking down the client’s problem into all its discrete pieces, testing hypotheses one by one, and iterating on the message until it was communicated perfectly. The final deck was a communication device. The work that went into it was what mattered. The same thing goes for entrepreneurs. A great pitch deck shows me you’ve researched, tested and thought deeply about every part of this opportunity, from the market to the customer to the [marketing](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/marketing) to the raise. It tells me you’re the expert, that you’ve done the work. As your prospective investor, why should I accept any less? Beyond the entrepreneurs’ basic handling of what it is they’re building, there’s an even bigger reason why a pitch deck is important: It shows that you know how to stand out from the crowd. Have you noticed how noisy the world is these days? There are ads and content literally everywhere. Everyone’s inboxes are packed with cold inbounds. Every possible marketing channel is saturated with brands. It is harder than ever to capture people’s attention. Not just investors—employees and customers, too. Every single startup—in fact, every single business—needs to figure out a way to stand apart. And it’s not just attention, it’s intention. Your entire job as an early stage startup founder is to convince people to make irrational decisions. You need to convince investors to give you money when there’s very little proof that the business is viable; you need to convince the most talented people to forego better salaries elsewhere and work for you; you need to convince customers to pay you for something that doesn’t really exist yet, nobody’s ever heard of or few have ever used. Do you honestly think you can do that with an AI-generated pitch deck? I want to say this as kindly as possible, but in the words of Brene Brown, [clear is kind](https://df1a7d4a.streak-link.com/DAM6EyeRUWbUxajzLgFc5WJ8/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fredirect%2F39b607df-fc6e-4c21-bf21-f2a1562fbae8%3Fj%3DeyJ1IjoiMXowNjFtIn0.v1E5SETk_RNcHlNPWO84rqvb_PPqMbmeLf_yr3OCPRM). So let me be clear: with the technology that’s available today, when you build your deck with AI, **you sound exactly like everyone else**. Perhaps the proliferation of AI-slop pitch decks is a problem of the VC establishments’ own making, a logical consequence of decades of coaching founders about the importance of the perfect deck. Thousands of accelerator cohorts—including some of mine—have taught founders to obsess over a perfectly calculated TAM, SAM, and SOM, how to show your traction, and how to make a team slide that pops. And then as investors we get those decks that founders have spent countless hours on, we flip through in 20 seconds, and 99 times out of 100, we pass. No wonder founders are over it. I totally get their frustration. The flipside, of course, is that building a company is just plain hard. There are more founders than money, there’s more ideas than customers. Most of us don’t get to skip the hard part and sail straight to success. If you’re not willing to put in the work, you probably shouldn’t be doing this in the first place. I’ve been coaching founders on how to raise early-stage capital for a decade. In the very early days, I taught pitch decks like a checklist, just like everyone else did at the time. It wasn’t long before I realized that was entirely the wrong approach. The goal of a pitch deck is not to be comprehensive, it’s to be compelling. You don’t need to tell the investor everything up front, you need to share just enough to get a meeting. If you create enough excitement and curiosity through slides (or a memo, or even just a really great email), I promise you, the investor will want to ask about the rest. Mission accomplished. Your deck doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be a deck! All it needs to do is answer three questions—why this, why you, and why now—as quickly, clearly and compellingly as possible. It is far, far harder to get this right than it is to write a prompt or even fill out a Canva template. I hope you do it anyway.