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Pitch Deck 101
You have under four minutes. Here's what actually gets read — lessons from Buffer's famous 13-slide raise.
Written for Axiom Pathways.
Investors spend under four minutes on a pitch deck the first time they see it — often under two if it doesn’t hold their attention. This piece uses Buffer’s famous 13-slide, half-a-million-dollar raise (a deck the founders later published in full) to pull out what actually works: shorter decks statistically raise more money, investors weigh the team slide over the product slide, and the strongest decks prove traction with numbers instead of promising it. Buffer’s own deck is the case study throughout — thirteen slides, one claim each, built for a reader skimming, not reading.