Your team slide is hiding your biggest advantage

This week I spoke with a founder who went straight into the pitch. The problem, the product, the market, the raise. Their own background got one line.

Twenty minutes in, I asked how they’d come to the problem. It turned out they’d spent six years inside it, watching the same thing break, trying to fix it with tools that weren’t built for the job. That was the most convincing part of the conversation, and it almost didn’t come up.

If I had a penny for every time I’ve experienced this, I could fund the round myself, with some left over for baklava. (Yep I wrote this while hungry again)

I often find founders treating their background as a quick introduction before the real stuff. A job title, a former employer, then on to the business.

To many founders, their background is simply what they did before. But for an early-stage investor, it helps answer a question about the future: what have you learned or done that gives you an advantage in building this company?

There’s a saying: in real estate, it’s location, location, location. In venture capital, it’s people, people, people.

Yet too many pitches leave investors to work out why these particular people have an advantage in solving this particular problem.

What the logos leave out

Look at the standard team slide.

Headshots. Names. Titles.

A row of former employers and university logos.

You learn where everyone worked, where they studied, and who had the best photographer or AI prompt these days.

Those are useful signals. But they leave some fairly important questions unanswered.

What did these people actually do? How well do they understand the customer? What have they already built or achieved that’s relevant?

“Previously at Amazon” could mean a hundred different things. The investor needs to understand which part of that experience matters to this business.

The AI effect

Anyone can now put together a polished deck with AI tools, and small teams can build what used to take many more people. To me, that makes it even more important to explain what your team brings beyond the tools everyone else can access.

DocSend’s 2024 research also found investors spent 40% more time on seed-stage team slides, and 30% more on pre-seed team slides, than anytime before.

Product, competition and go-to-market still matter. Alongside them sits a question your pitch needs to answer clearly:

Who’s building this, and what gives them an advantage?

What your past gives you today

Founders sometimes assume the connection is obvious. You’ve lived your career. The investor has had your PDF open for 90 seconds, 120 if they’re feeling generous that day.

“I spent ten years in logistics. Now I’m building logistics software.”

But ten years could mean managing a fleet, selling software to operators, or spending every Friday fixing scheduling errors because the existing system couldn’t handle last-minute changes.

The detail matters because it helps an investor understand what you bring to the company.

Maybe you know which features customers will actually pay for. Maybe you understand the operational constraints that make a seemingly good solution impossible to adopt. Maybe you’ve spent years earning the trust of the people you now need to sell to.

Having encountered a problem is a starting point. The stronger argument is what you can do because of it: make better product decisions, reach customers faster, or avoid mistakes another team would have to learn the hard way.

You don’t need a famous employer to demonstrate this. Someone who spent years running a small distribution business could understand warehouse operations in ways a team with impressive tech credentials has never encountered.

Make the connection explicit

Imagine a founder building dispatch software.

Weak: “Ten years of experience in logistics.”

That tells me how long they’ve worked. It gives me little sense of why their experience matters here.

Better: “Managed dispatch for 200 drivers.”

Now I understand their responsibility and proximity to the problem.

Stronger: “Managed dispatch for 200 drivers and built a scheduling tool that cut planning time by 40%.”

Now I have evidence of relevant experience and the ability to build something people use.

There’s obviously more to ask. But the conversation has somewhere useful to go.

That’s what a strong team slide should do: give an investor specific reasons to believe this team can execute, and something meaningful to investigate.

A personal story can help explain your motivation, too. If your family’s business struggled with the problem, say how that shaped your understanding or approach.

You don’t need to manufacture a dramatic origin story. A concrete example of work you’ve done can carry plenty of weight.

Before your next pitch

For each founder, answer three questions:

1. What have you done that’s directly relevant to this business?

2. What do you know that a smart outsider would have to learn the hard way?

3. What evidence shows you can put that knowledge to work?

Then look at the team together. Make it clear how your experience combines to cover the work ahead: building the product, understanding the customer, and getting it into the market.

Bring the strongest answers into the pitch. Put one concise line per founder on the slide, with the fuller story ready for the conversation.

Keep the logos if they help. Give the investor enough context to understand what sits behind them.

If your team’s experience is one of the strongest reasons to back the company, consider bringing the team slide earlier in the deck. Give investors that context before they assess the rest of the pitch.

The founder I spoke with had spent six years learning something valuable. It took twenty minutes for us to get to it.

If your background is one of the strongest reasons to back you, make sure it comes up while you still have the room’s attention.

Worth Asking

If an investor had to explain to their partners, in one sentence, why your team has an advantage in solving this problem, what would they say?

Is that sentence anywhere in your pitch?

Clipped

Stanford professor Karl Deisseroth tells his kids he’s just won the Nobel Prize.

Judging by their reaction, he’s already won at life. No fundraising lesson here. Just a lovely moment worth watching.

Big Enough To Back?

This week was about why investors should back you. On 27 October in Dubai, we’ll cover the other question: whether the business is big enough. There are 25 places for founders who are raising, and you can apply to be one of the three companies whose plans are discussed live. Apply here →