Entrepreneurs get obsessed with making sure their pitch deck is right. And here's what I'm going tell you today : your pitch deck is why you are failing, because you've fallen into a trap.

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A trap that many VCs have led you into, unfortunately. And what I mean by this is they've told you you need a great pitch deck.

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You need to make sure that you follow the Sequoia format that is decades old. But the reality is the pitch deck, you focus so much time, you spend so much money on it, and you completely forget the things that businesses are really built on narratives. And relationships.

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What you have to be able to figure out is what is the narrative that is going to make an investor feel like it is inevitable you're going to succeed.

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I'm going to tell you right now that the VCs, even the ones who tell you you need a pitch deck behind the scenes because I work with their founders, are not requiring pitch decks or looking at them. In fact, they're not even telling their founders to really focus on a pitch deck at all.

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They're instead telling their founders to focus on building relationships and building a great story.

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Nobody's investing in your pitch deck.

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They're investing in you, the entrepreneur. So when we think about relationships and and narratives, I want to talk about a specific example that you can look at because it's perfect in terms of what you need to do in the movie The Big Short.

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There's an amazing scene where Ryan Gosling is presenting to Steve Carell's character. When Ryan walks in, he immediately uses an analogy. The analogy he uses is Jenga blocks. He builds them up and he says "you take 'em out. Take 'em out. Take him out, and then boom, they all fall over."

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Beautiful. Metaphors. Analogies. That's a part of your narrative. That's a part of your storytelling.

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If you get the metaphor right, everything becomes quite easy. Inside of that scene, Ryan shows that there's a problem that's going on, there's a future coming and I'm here in the middle showing how you can win through the impending chaos.  

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That chaos is mortgage backed securities. The whole market's going to crash. It's all going to be terrible. And what he uses is a beautiful visual example inside of his storytelling.

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He says, "I'm here telling you the house is on fire and I'm offering you fire insurance. You can literally see the house on fire and I am selling you fire insurance anyways. So that when the house burns down, you're gonna get to go and claim all of that money from the fire insurance that is making it feel inevitable."

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Who wouldn't invest in that?

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Let's use another example. Let's say somebody came to you today and said, "Bitcoin is gonna go to a million dollars."

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Wouldn't you buy? It would be obvious, of course you would buy.

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That's the type of inevitability that you want to feel, and you as a founder, entrepreneur, your job isn't to present some polished pitch deck that a McKinsey person created for you.

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Instead, your job is to be a human. Show what makes you special, and then deliver the story that makes an investor say, "holy shit, this thing is gonna come true."

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When you nail that, that light bulb moment, you will see it in their eyes. I watch investor calls with founders, and I can see the moment in their eyes when they're like "this thing is coming true."

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There's no doubt about it. It didn't come come from the pitch deck. It came from relationships and narrative in the story. That's your job as a founder.

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In fact, I've talked about this before a little bit with inevitability about the inevitable mindset, which is part of what it takes to convince an investor that you are worth giving money to is you the founder, the entrepreneur, have to have a mindset of the future that I am telling you about is inevitable, nothing will stop it.

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So instead of spending $10,000, $20,000 or more on your pitch deck, go spend some time building relationships. Go spend some time building your story, building the narrative, practicing how you're going to deliver it, figuring out your analogies, figuring out your visual language.

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I've worked with enough founders. We've raised at this point over a half a billion dollars.

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They aren't doing it on pitch deck.

They're doing it on storytelling and relationships.

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They're doing it because they make it feel inevitable, and then they go out and because they feel it's inevitable and they share a story that feels inevitable, they ultimately make it come true.

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That's what you want to do. Stop wasting money on pitch decks, stop falling for the bad advice out there, and instead get working on your relationships and your narrative.

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And good things. I promise you, good things are coming your way. You might still have a couple questions after watching that video.

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This one that just popped up right here is gonna help you explain and answer those questions that you may have so you can get better results. Check it out now. Go watch it and see what you think.