Summary
Every week, thousands of founders open Canva or Google Slides or, God help them, PowerPoint, and begin the ritual. They agonize over fonts. They nudge logos three pixels to the left. They workshop whether the TAM slide should come before or after the team slide, as though the ordering of these particular runes determines whether capital flows or doesn’t. They search “pitch deck template YC” and download something that looks exactly like every other deck built from a template found by searching ” ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ Westenberg. The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead. By JA Westenberg • 9 Feb 2026
Every week, thousands of founders open Canva or Google Slides or, God help them, PowerPoint, and begin the ritual. They agonize over fonts. They nudge logos three pixels to the left. They workshop whether the TAM slide should come before or after the team slide, as though the ordering of these particular runes determines whether capital flows or doesn’t. They search “pitch deck template YC” and download something that looks exactly like every other deck built from a template found by searching “pitch deck template YC.” They use Claude Opus to generate slide decks, or Gamma to beautify scripts. And it’s a near-pointless activity. I’ve sat through hundreds of pitches at this poin…
Highlights
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I can tell you with some confidence that the “quality” of the deck is inversely correlated with the quality of the thinking behind it.
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William Zinsser argued in On Writing Well that the act of writing forces clarity - because you can’t write a clear sentence about a thing you don’t understand.
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Writing and thinking are functionally the same activity, or close enough that the distinction doesn’t matter.
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The deck was optimized for human eyeballs scanning in three minutes and forty-four seconds. The pitch.md is optimized for a world where the first reader might not be human at all, and where the second reader, the partner who actually writes checks, wants substance they can verify rather than styling they can admire.
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Markdown strips away the ability to design your way out of a weak argument. In a deck, you can make a questionable claim feel authoritative by putting it in 72-point Helvetica on a dark background with a lot of whitespace. In a markdown file, a questionable claim looks like exactly what it is: a sentence that needs to be better.
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If you can’t explain your idea clearly in writing, you probably can’t explain it clearly at all, and if you can’t explain it clearly at all, you probaly don’t understand it well enough to build it.