beauty

did your pitch deck win the beauty contest?

Author

Jorian Hoover
February 24, 2026

Hey friends, it’s Jorian—welcome to Into the Ring. I’m a startup fundraising coach and have worked with 50+ founders who’ve raised over $190M.

For today’s newsletter, I’ll discuss 90% vs 99% certainty when fundraising, review the latest fundraising rounds Tier 1 VCs led last week, share my recommended VC newsletters/podcasts, and give a deep dive on if your pitch deck should be beautiful.

Last, thank you for being part of this Into the Ring tribe of 1.8K+ startup founders and operators/investors from OpenAI, Anthropic, a16z, Lightspeed, etc. If you think someone else might like this newsletter, they can sign up here.

Now onto today’s newsletter!

In today’s issue:

  1. Jorian’s 1min take: 90% vs 99% certainty

  2. What funding rounds did Tier 1 VCs lead last week (Feb 14-20, 2026)

  3. This week’s recommended VC essays & podcast episodes

  4. Today’s deep dive on how to fundraise like a pro: do you need a beautiful pitch deck?

1. Jorian’s 1min take: 90% vs 99% certainty

One of the mistakes I see founders routinely make when preparing for a fundraise is over-indexing on certainty.

The thing is, fundraising for your startup is uncertain. Unless you’re the hottest deal in town, there’s no way to know exactly which VCs will bite and what terms they’ll give you.

This uncertainty is scary, for sure. But sometimes I see this bleed into too much caution when preparing for a fundraise.

The situation goes like this — two months ago, a founder had their pitch deck & VC list ready. But over the past two months, they’ve been pushing back their fundraise endlessly to gain more certainty about what will happen. And they’ve held off on kicking off conversations with VCs.

They keep having more conversations with friends in startupland, friendly VCs, and so on to further fine-tune their message. They’ve updated their pitch deck a dozen times after it was “ready.”

But in pushing back their fundraise, they’ve lost two months of building time, and I’m not sure how much additional certainty they’ve (actually) garnered.

So if you’re preparing for a fundraise, try to hit 90% certainty rather than going for 99%.

3. This week’s recommended VC essays & podcast episodes

  • Newsletter: "Clouded Judgement 2.20.26 - The SSD / Memory Reckoning” (link) by Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter Capital. Over the past year, there’s become a shortage of memory — you may have noticed it if you’re building your own computer. Jamin Ball writes an in-depth analysis of what’s happening in the memory market (many memory companies are up 300-1000% in the stock market) and why it’s happening.

  • Newsletter: “Kill the press release” (link) by the team at a16z crypto. The writer makes an impassioned plea for startups to stop releasing press releases through the likes of Business Wire / etc. and instead to publish native blog posts when sharing news. The a16z team argues that press releases haven’t worked for decades, and they certainly don’t work now.

  • Newsletter: “Modeling software after SaaS” (link) by Yoni Rechtman, Partner at Slow Ventures. Yoni Rechtman always give in-depth breakdowns and he’s shared his belief of how software economics will change in the era of AI. Well worth a read to see if you agree or disagree with him.

  • Newsletter: “A Third, A Third, A Surprising Third” (link) by Tomasz Tunguz, Partner at Theory Ventures. Tomasz Tunguz shares data on how liquidity in VC in 2025 was one third from secondaries, one third from IPOs, and one third from M&A — completely different than what we saw several years ago (when secondaries played almost no part in liquidity).

  • Newsletter: “The Fintech Giants Have Arrived” (link) by Sarah Lamont of F-Prime. This was a preview of F-Prime’s “State of Fintech 2026 report” where they talk through how yesterday’s disruptors (Revolut, Stripe, Toast, etc.) have officially arrived and have re-defined their categories.

4. Today's Deep Dive on How to Fundraise Like a Pro: do you need a beautiful pitch deck?

If I gave you two startup options to invest in at the seed stage, which would you choose?

  • Option A: a startup with strong fundamentals & traction, but their pitch deck looks like a middle schooler built it in 2006 PowerPoint

  • Option B: a startup with weak fundamentals & traction, but their pitch deck & brand are beautifully designed, looking modern & visionary

I bet 95% of you would pick Option A.

But what if I gave you the chance to invest in one more option…

  • Option C: a startup with strong fundamentals & traction, and their pitch deck & brand are beautifully designed, looking modern & visionary

Of course we would all want to invest in Option C.

Too often on LinkedIn & Twitter, you’ll hear people say a beautiful pitch deck is never what receives funding. But this assumes that the startup behind this pitch deck is smoke & mirrors.

Why a beautiful pitch deck matters

So why do I believe a beautiful pitch deck that looks modern & visionary is important? I believe this for three reasons:

  1. Beautiful pitch decks are generally clear in their messaging. And clarity in your pitch deck is crucial. A pitch deck is often a VC’s first impression of your startup, and when they see thousands of other startups each year, you want to make sure they understand your messaging. Otherwise, they may misunderstand what what problem you're solving and prematurely pass on you.

  2. If your deck is beautiful & clear, you've likely found a crystal clear way to describe your startup when pitching. The work to make your story crisp in your pitch deck will pay dividends to how you talk about your startup, too. Founders often struggle with what the best entry point is in describing their startups. If you've got it locked down for your pitch deck, then there's a good chance you're able to talk about it with clarity as well.

  3. VCs look for signals that you're a VC-backable startup. You know the phrase "if it looks like a duck and if it quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck"? Well the same applies to pitch decks. If a VC sees an unclear pitch deck that gives them 2006 vibes, their pattern matching brains will negatively associate your business to that. Worse yet, they may think you don't think strong branding and design are important elements in your startup.

Do a reality check on your pitch deck

Many founders don't even realize that their pitch deck is ugly and isn't meeting the mark. So it's important to do a reality check on your own pitch deck.

You can do this yourself, by going through repositories of VC-backed decks (see here and here for two good examples) and comparing the designs with what you've built internally. And you can also ask a connection in the VC & startup ecosystem to give you honest feedback on the design of your pitch deck.

If your pitch deck isn't up-to-par, I'd much rather you find that out before you start speaking with VCs than while you're fundraising. That way you can do something about it.

Options to beautify your pitch deck

If you've taken a look in the mirror and realized you need to beautify your pitch deck, you have a few different options.

First, you might already have a designer in-house that you can leverage. Or, if you want to keep the design simple, you can build something relatively easily yourself in Canva or in Figma. But if you realized your deck needs some work, it's likely you don't have design chops internally.

Second, you can go hire a designer to specifically help you build your pitch deck. Note: try to find someone who's already designed pitch decks before, and ask to see some samples. I've come across too many founders who've had to switch pitch designers because the one they worked with wasn't sure how to design a pitch deck that would land with a VC.

And third, you can hire a firm that's focused on helping you design and write your pitch deck. This is if you want more of a full-service offering — someone who can go back-and-forth on the content of your pitch deck while also overseeing the design aspects.

Your pitch deck is not the only thing that matters when fundraising. But if you have the fundamentals & team to be VC-backable, then having a beautiful, crisp pitch deck can make a big difference.

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