Addressing the issue of fake pitch decks:

I gathered the decks from a variety of sources on the web and trusted they were originals. Although interpretations of company pitch decks may be of value for some people. I'd rather this be a collection of original pitch decks.

If I had have known this would receive the interest it got, I would have spent more time vetting them before uploading. The vast majority of them are originals and come from demo days of accelerators. But going through them again, some of them do indeed look dubious and I've removed them. I'm working on adding sources/references to each of the decks as well some of the other great ideas people have had.

If anyone notices pitches that don't look to be originals please comment here and I'll take them down. Thanks :)

Thanks for bringing this up. I've taken the FB deck down. It was a mistake for me not to properly vet each of them before uploading them and it does look pretty dubious.

Thanks for the admiration for the work I put into it. It didn't take too much time and it was a fun project to work on :) I'll try to remedy the fabricated decks

So, you are admitting some of the decks have been fabricated? Which ones?

If you read the comments here you'll find the author saying "I don't want to promote a 2nd year business student's work as an original pitch deck so I can look more closely into the provenance of problem slides if you could name these and I'll either redact them or adjust the title accordingly. Thanks for bringing this up :)"

Don't think it's quite as dramatic as you imply here, and I don't think anyone is deliberately fabricating slide decks in order to trick you.

The site claims these are original pitch decks from famous companies. Exciting!

So, I look at a a couple, but quickly get the feeling that these may not be genuine, that this site might be theonion of pitch decks, or something. I go to HN comments to see what others think.

I was disappointed to find that the author of the site apparently doesn't really know if these are real or not. I'd like to see more than a passive aggressive "oh gee thanks this was a fun project 2nd year business student blah blah I'll look into it", when the site clearly claims to show me “Facebook's original pitch deck” as the FIRST one which is very obviously not genuine.

He's admitting he may have made a mistake.

Kegstand? If so, fair play for them having that in one of their early pitch decks and still becoming one of our tech overloads. I felt if we put a foot out of line in our pitch deck we were sunk. Number don't lie though, they had serious traction...

Sorry man... I'm sure you have good reasons to question the validity of some of them and I don't doubt your sincerity. It was my understanding that they are all legitimate. I don't want to promote a 2nd year business student's work as an original pitch deck so I can look more closely into the provenance of problem slides if you could name these and I'll either redact them or adjust the title accordingly. Thanks for bringing this up :)

I just want to add my 2 cents in hope that it's helpful. I'm a co-founder/partner of a seed-stage VC fund and do keep track of the pitch decks we've seen as a partnership over the past two funds spanning six years.

Comparing these decks to the decks I have in our tracker (a dataset of similar size to yours), there's a lot of differences. Even if you only take the pitch decks of the successful companies (most of which we didn't invest in), a lot of these decks look a lot more polished.

Here's what I think is going on: Some decks are undoubtably real seed pitch decks, some decks are demo day decks from accelerators, and a few of these decks (Facebook's, for example) are after-the-fact business school exercises from students.

So, I do think most decks are real, but what's tripping up some people is how polished some of the decks are. True pitch decks used to get a seed round or into an accelerator aren't very polished because you're constantly changing the deck based on feedback over the span of 20-50 pitches. The truth is that many investors I know worry when they see a too-polished deck that everyone else has already seen the deal and passed :-P.

Not that I have first-hand experience at successfully pitching for huge money, but I completely agree. A lot of successful companies have average pitch decks but have great content on their side. One takeaway I've gotten from this side-project is that with pitch decks design doesn't matter but story-telling does.

The archive of pitch decks is really just post hoc confirmation of what were excellent, well-timed, and well-executed business plans. Imagine the thousands of great pitches that didn't end so well. I have seen many excellent teams with great pitches that failed for reasons entirely outside their control and reasonable ability to anticipate.

That's really interesting, and a great way of analyzing pitches. I've noticed most seem to follow the order you have listed too. It's pretty similar to the template Sequoia shared. Interesting that you found the pitches that used a different order were the ones that stuck with you - I guess that template is used a lot these days so audiences are probably familiar with it.

What I'd love to do with this at some point is to label each slide and do some analysis of the pitches: i.e. what percentage of pitches have traction slides, what percentage have market size slides, what order do they appear in (as you have said), how many slides are dedicated to the solution, etc, etc.

Thanks for sharing your insight, it's an interesting exercise. If those notes ever appear again, HMU :) I'd love to see them.

Yeah absolutely, I'd like that too. I think year, amount raised, stage, sector and team size would be a good start

Good idea, I can add the sources/references in. They were scattered around a lot of different websites

Yeah absolutely, I was thinking a filter by the funding round, year, team size and industry would be good. Any others? It has been a fun side project and I wasn't sure if people would be interested in it so I wanted to launch early and get some feedback before putting more time into it.

Might be too much to ask - but is it possible to add current status ( public / private / acquired / defunct ), funding source ( prominent VCs that picked them up ) or valuation ( highest / seed / other rounds )

I've been working on my deck for the last few months. What's. most useful would be funding round / year. Also, your search is broken so I can't tell you if you're missing any decks.