There is a great deal of advice floating around about how to create a successful venture pitch deck. Practitioners from Sequoia to Carta to Guy Kawasaki describe the ideal 10-15 slide content outline entrepreneurs should cover in their pitch decks. Other sources, such as TechStars and Y-Combinator discuss communication style and how to grab attention of VCs and still others offer general guidelines and success factors about the capital raising process. These are all valuable resources.
There is surprisingly little advice on what, exactly, a pitch deck needs to convey about the business to make it investable.
An compelling pitch is not a story about a product. Or a pain point. Or a technology, Or a market.
What makes a venture investable are its economics and the most compelling pitch frames the venture as a strong economic engine.
Too many founders miss this opportunity. Those that do put themselves in another league.
Below I lay out ten economic arguments I see the most compelling ventures deliberately weave throughout the pitch deck—arguments that form the backbone of how investors evaluate opportunities and return-potential.
Ten Economic Arguments that Promote Invest-ability
1. Proprietary Insight into How Shifts in Economics are Creating a Valuable Emerging Marketspace
Every compelling startup begins with a market that is changing—not just a market that is “big” or “growing.” Markets evolve when underlying economics evolve. This can happen because technology lowers cost curves, new data becomes available, industries converge, customer behavior shifts, or regulatory changes unlock opportunity. The reasons vary, but the effect is the same: a new marketspace emerges because the economics now support it.
The founder’s job is to tell this story of the economic shift—and the opportunity created by it.
The most powerful form of this argument is to suggest that economic shifts have (now) created the conditions that require a business like this to spring into being. You are the venture that spotted the opportunity and (as will be argued later) yours is the venture to capture it.
When you can articulate the forces reshaping the economic landscape that gives rise to your opportunity, you immediately separate yourself from founders who are simply chasing trends or technologies.
2. A Theory About How the Venture will Insert into Existing Industry Structures
No matter how novel or disruptive a venture’s solution may be, the venture still needs to traverse an existing industry system—one defined by incumbent economics, entrenched power structures, and deeply rooted workflows. These structures—not offerings—are often the strongest governing forces for how value is created and captured. Sophisticated founders recognize this.
The strongest founders don’t just explain how their offerings will disrupt other offerings; they also paint a picture of how their offerings will disrupt established industry structures (channels, value-chains, etc.) and fit with/or shape new structures. It’s a higher-level understanding of the economics that drive the industry.
This moves the narrative from product-level differentiation to industry-level economic advantage. It shows investors that the founder understands how value flows today—where costs pool, where frictions concentrate, where margins are trapped—and how emerging technologies, changing customer behaviors, or shifting regulatory boundaries will reshape those flows. The founder’s job is to connect these macro-level forces to the micro-level mechanics of their business model.
3. A Value Proposition Grounded in the Market’s Evolving Economic Needs
Founders often speak eloquently about “pain points,” technological improvements, and user frustrations. Strong founders understand the economics behind those problems—and what it takes in terms of performance and price for buyers to actually adopt new solutions.
How much value does your solution create relative to what it will cost? How does that value show up—in reduced spend, increased productivity, shorter cycle times, fewer errors, higher throughput? Often those benefits need to deliver 10x the performance of the existing solutions to incent change.
When founders can articulate the economics clearly, everything else—pricing, unit economics, traction quality—becomes far more credible.
4. A Differentiated Competitive Position Based on Compounding Strategic Assets
All startups begin with a product, but the most enduring ones evolve into businesses powered by strategic assets. It’s one thing to articulate the promise of a compelling product or defensible IP; it’s far more powerful to show how the architecture of the business creates advantages that compound over time.
Investors want to understand how the supporting elements of your ecosystem—data, proprietary technology, early go-to-market footholds, ecosystem partnerships, customer switching costs, specialized expertise—reinforce one another to create structural advantage. These are not ancillary features; they are the building blocks of long-term economic power.
Bundled strategic assets are exponentially more valuable than standalone strengths. They explain not only why you can win early, but why you can stay ahead, even as competitors respond. This is the real story of defensibility: the system of capabilities, relationships, and assets that compound into a differentiated competitive position the market cannot easily replicate.
5. A Vision for the End-State Business Model—And the Ultimate Role You Will Play in the Market
Founders ordinarily focus on the next mile of the journey: what they're building now, what they’ll release soon, what milestones they’re tracking toward. Very few talk about the destination.
Investors need to understand not only what you are building, but what position you aim to occupy in the industry’s long-term structure. What unique role will your company play? Will you become the system orchestrator, the data spine, the dominant workflow layer, the lowest-cost producer, the category-defining platform? What will your end-state revenue engine, margin profile, and profit-pool control look like—and why is this end-state economically inevitable if your thesis is right?
This is not about forecasting with precision; investors know the world is unpredictable. But it is about demonstrating that you have a vision for the structural trajectory of the business: how your assets, capabilities, and positioning compound into a business that matters.
Founders who can articulate their eventual role in the market show investors they are building not just a product, but a future industry fixture. That is the distinction between an “interesting company” and an enduringly important one.
6. A Vision for Multi-Layer Value-Capture —and How Value Compounds Across Layers
A compelling business usually creates value in layers. There’s an initial offering layer (Level 1), then expanded offerings or monetization models (Level 2), and eventually a platform or ecosystem layer (Level 3).
Great founders describe a vision for these layers not as an afterthought, but as part of a deliberate design at day one. When you explain how Levels 2 and 3 become possible once Level 1 succeeds, you are describing option value—one of the core drivers of venture-scale returns.
This layered framing helps investors see both the “now” and the “potential.”
7. Evidence of Market Traction--Aligned with Long-Term Economics
Traction only counts if it tells investors something about your economics. Signups, downloads, and pilot programs matter only if they predict what long-term revenue, margins, retention, or cost structure will look like.
Founders should draw a direct line between today’s traction signals and tomorrow’s economic reality. Is early adoption correlated with renewal? Are users exhibiting behaviors that justify your target pricing model? Are acquisition channels scaling efficiently? Are cohorts behaving in ways that resemble your long-term assumptions?
When this link is strong, traction becomes meaningful. When it’s weak, traction may be just noise.
8. A Team Aligned to the Economic Engine of the Business
Investors always care about the team. But the real question they ask silently is:
Is this the team that can build the specific economic engine this unique business requires?
If your moat is data-driven, investors look for deep ML and data-engineering strength.
If your moat is GTM-driven, they look for enterprise sales expertise. If your competitive advantage depends on navigating regulation or ecosystem coordination, they look for leaders who have done that before.
When founders connect their team’s backgrounds directly to the underlying economic fulcrums of the business, investors don’t just see a talented group—they see the right group.
9. A Multi-Staged Execution Plan That Optimizes “Build” Economics
Investors and founders alike both know every business is built in stages. But very few founders explain their plans for growth beyond the next raise. Fewer still explain that there is a long-term view of how the business will be developed or why the roadmap is structured the way it is.
The strongest pitches acknowledge a vision toward staged development over the long-term that is engineered to optimize the economics of the business at each stage. What risks are retired at each stage? Why in that order? What do we expect to have proven about the business at stage 3 (for example)? What amount of capital do we estimate we will need across stages? Importantly, how will these build-stages produce returns for investors?
This staged view of this business is exactly how investors think of the business. Capital is not deployed to “build features” or “increase runway.” It’s deployed to engineer economic inflection points. When founders explain their sequencing in terms that align with investor views, the pitch becomes more sophisticated, more intentional, and far more compelling.
10. Completeness of Vision
Finally, investors look for founders who can zoom out and unify the entire narrative.
They want to see that you understand the structural forces shaping the industry, have a view of the evolving market, understand shifting economics, competitive dynamics, and moats, and command over the trajectory of the business.
Completeness of vision is one of the strongest signals of founder quality. It’s what enables a team to navigate uncertainty, adapt to change, and make economically intelligent decisions under pressure. Investors don’t expect omniscience. They expect command over the full set of economics and economic forces impacting the business.
When they see it, they lean in.
A More Rigorous Way to Communicate Venture Potential
Pitch decks are too often treated as stories about problems and solutions. When most compelling, pitch decks tell stories about economic engines.
In a world where capital is selective, technology shifts are rapid, and competitive advantage is increasingly transient, the founders who win will be the ones who can articulate the deepest and most cohesive view of the economic landscape they’re entering.