I Review 200+ Pitch Decks a Month at a $400M Fund — Here's Why I Pass on 98% of Them
I'm going to tell you what nobody at Demo Day will.
I've spent the last four years at a $400M early-stage venture fund. My job, reduced to its most honest description, is saying no. I say no roughly 196 times for every 200 decks that cross my desk. That's not hyperbole — I tracked it for all of last year. We took 247 first meetings out of approximately 2,400 inbound decks. Of those 247, we issued 11 term sheets. Of those 11, we closed 9 deals.
That's a 0.375% hit rate from cold deck to closed deal. And we're considered a "founder-friendly" fund.
I'm writing this because I'm tired of seeing the same avoidable mistakes torch otherwise promising companies. I'm tired of the cargo-cult advice from people who raised once in 2020 and now tweet about fundraising like they cracked the code. And I'm tired of the information asymmetry that makes this whole system feel more like a secret society than a capital market.
So here it is — the unvarnished view from inside the machine.
The Math Nobody Explains to You
Before I get into the deck mistakes, you need to understand VC fund economics, because they explain almost everything about why we behave the way we do.
Our fund is $400M. We have a 2% management fee (standard) and 20% carry. We need to return at least 3x the fund — $1.2 billion — to our LPs for the fund to be considered successful. Anything less than 2x and we're probably not raising another fund.
We make roughly 30-35 investments per fund at an average check size of $8-12M (Series A focus). The math demands that at least 2-3 of those companies return 50-100x our investment. Not 5x. Not 10x. 50 to 100x.
This is why we pass on "good" companies. A company that will probably become a $200M business is, paradoxically, not interesting to us at a $40M pre-money valuation. We need the $5B+ outcomes. The power law governs everything.
When I look at your deck, I'm not asking "is this a good business?" I'm asking "could this be one of the 2-3 investments that return our entire fund?" If the answer isn't a plausible yes, I have to pass — even if I genuinely admire what you're building.
Let that sink in. Most VC passes are not a judgment on your company. They're a consequence of portfolio math.
The Top 12 Reasons I Pass (Ranked by Frequency)
I categorized my passes for the last 18 months. Here's what actually kills decks, from most to least common:
1. The market slide is a TAM fantasy (~40% of passes) "The global fintech market is $324 billion by 2028." Cool. What's your serviceable addressable market? I need to see a bottoms-up calculation: number of potential customers × realistic ACV × reasonable penetration rate. The top-down TAM slide from a Grand View Research report tells me nothing except that you Googled your industry.
2. No evidence of demand (~25% of passes) You have a product. Maybe it's even a good product. But you've shown me zero evidence that anyone wants it badly enough to pay for it. No waitlist numbers, no LOIs, no design partners, no pilot results, no desperate emails from potential customers. Nothing. At our stage, I'm not asking for $10M ARR, but I need some signal that the market is pulling this out of your hands.
3. The team slide doesn't explain the unfair advantage (~20%) "Ex-Google, ex-McKinsey, Stanford MBA" — I see this fifty times a week. What I need to know is why this specific team will win this specific market. Did your CTO build the ranking algorithm at the incumbent? Did your CEO spend eight years as a buyer in the exact persona you're selling to? The team slide should make me think "oh, of course these are the people to do this." It almost never does.
4. Unit economics are missing or impossible (~18%) If you're post-revenue and you don't show me CAC, LTV, payback period, and gross margin, I assume it's because the numbers are bad. If you do show them and your LTV:CAC ratio is 1.5:1 while burning $400K/month, we have a different problem. I once saw a deck that claimed a 45-day payback period with an enterprise sales cycle. The cognitive dissonance was remarkable.
5. The ask doesn't match the plan (~15%) You're raising $8M but your use-of-funds slide describes activities that would cost $2M. Or you're raising $3M but need to hire 40 engineers. The mismatch tells me you haven't actually modeled the business. I want to see: "We're raising X, it gives us Y months of runway, and by month Z we'll hit milestones A, B, C that position us for the next round."
6. Competitive landscape is either empty or dishonest (~12%) The "we have no competitors" slide is an instant credibility killer. You always have competitors — they might be indirect, they might be the status quo (Excel spreadsheets and manual processes), but they exist. The 2x2 matrix where you're magically in the top-right quadrant is almost as bad. Show me you deeply understand the landscape and can articulate specifically why customers would switch.
7. The story is incoherent (~10%) Slide 1 talks about a problem in healthcare logistics. Slide 5 reveals you're actually building a general-purpose API platform. Slide 9 mentions a pivot to financial services. I can't tell what you do. The best decks have a throughline I can repeat back in one sentence after seeing it once. If I can't, neither can the partner I need to champion this to.
8. No moat, no wedge, no insight (~10%) You're building a slightly better version of something that exists. Your differentiation is "better UX" or "AI-powered." Every deck in 2024-2026 says AI-powered. What's the proprietary data advantage? The network effect? The regulatory moat? The counter-intuitive insight about the market that nobody else has? Without one of these, you're a feature, not a company.
9. Founder-market fit is invisible (~8%) Related to the team point but distinct — I can't see why you care about this problem. The best founders I've backed have an almost obsessive, personal connection to the problem space. They've lived it. They dream about it. When I ask "why this?" and the answer is "we saw an opportunity in the market," I know this founder will pivot to whatever's hot next year.
10. The deck itself is a mess (~7%) 40+ slides. Walls of text. Inconsistent formatting. Clip art. Comic Sans (yes, still happens). A terrible deck doesn't mean a terrible company, but it signals something about attention to detail and communication skills. Your deck is a proxy for how you'll communicate with customers, employees, and future investors. If it's sloppy, I worry.
11. Timing is wrong (~5%) Too early for us (pre-product, pre-revenue when we're Series A) or too late (you've already raised a $30M Series B and we can't get enough ownership). Timing also means market timing — sometimes the technology or regulatory environment isn't ready. I've passed on companies that were right about everything except when.
12. Red flags in the cap table or terms (~3%) Excessive dilution from previous rounds, weird investor rights, founder vesting that's already fully accelerated, three co-founders who've already left. The cap table tells the story of every decision you've made. I read it like a novel.
Why We Ghost (and I'm Sorry)
Let me address the elephant in the room. VCs ghost. It's terrible. I try not to, but I understand why it happens, even as I fight against it.
A typical Monday for me: 200+ unread emails, 8 scheduled meetings, 3 partner meetings, 2 board calls, and a pile of memos to write. Each "no" email is a conversation I could get pulled into — the founder pushes back, asks for feedback, wants a second meeting. Multiply that by 40 passes a week and you understand the math of why people go silent.
It's not an excuse. It's an explanation. The system is broken. We ask founders to pour their hearts into a pitch and then we can't be bothered to type "no thank you." I send a templated pass email for every deck I review, and it still takes me 2-3 hours per week just to close loops.
What you can do about it: Set a two-week timer after any meeting or submission. If you haven't heard back, send exactly one follow-up with a clear subject line: "Following up: [Company Name] — should I assume this is a pass?" That email has a 70% response rate in my experience because it gives us an easy out.
The Warm Intro Industrial Complex
Here's an uncomfortable truth: roughly 80% of our funded deals came through warm intros. That's not because warm intro companies are inherently better. It's because warm intros signal social proof, and they come pre-filtered through someone whose judgment we've already calibrated.
Is this fair? Absolutely not. It means that founders with access to networks — often through elite schools, prior startup experience, or geographic proximity to major hubs — have a structural advantage. A brilliant founder in Lagos or Medellín or Boise starts the race behind someone with a Stanford classmate who's now a partner at Sequoia.
The industry is slowly changing. More funds are going direct-inbound-friendly. Application platforms like those run by Y Combinator, Techstars, and others have democratized some access. But warm intros still dominate.
How to get a warm intro when you don't have a network:
- Angel investors from your industry are the most underused intro path. A $25K angel check from a respected operator in your space is worth more than $500K from a random family office, because that angel can make warm intros all day.
- Other founders in the fund's portfolio are usually happy to intro you if you ask nicely. Look at the portfolio page, find someone in an adjacent space, and cold-email them (founders respond to other founders).
- Conference hallway conversations still work. Not the main stage — the hallway, the dinner, the after-party. VCs are humans who respond to genuine enthusiasm.
- Build in public. Tweet your metrics, write about your space, share what you're learning. I've sourced three deals in the last year from founders whose writing I followed before they ever knew I existed.
What the 2% Get Right
The decks that make it through my filter — and all the way to a term sheet — share common traits:
They tell a story, not a slideshow. The best deck I saw last quarter opened with a specific customer's pain point, followed them through the failed solutions, introduced the product as the resolution, and then zoomed out to show why this was a billion-dollar pattern. I was hooked by slide 3.
They show velocity, not vanity. I don't care about your total registered users. I care about week-over-week growth in the metric that matters most. Show me the slope of the curve, not the cumulative number.
They understand their own weaknesses. When a founder says "here's what could kill us, and here's how we think about mitigating it," my trust goes up dramatically. The ones who present everything as sunshine are either delusional or hiding something.
They make the ask specific and justified. "$10M at $40M pre, 18-month runway to hit $3M ARR, which positions us for a $15-20M Series B at 10x ARR multiple." That sentence tells me you've done the work.
They follow up with substance, not desperation. The best founder follow-up I've received was a monthly two-line email: their top metric and one insight they'd learned. No ask. Just signal. After four months, I reached out to them.
The Uncomfortable Truths
I'll end with some things that are true and unpleasant:
Pattern matching is real and it's a problem. VCs say they fund non-obvious ideas, but the data shows we overwhelmingly fund familiar patterns: founders who look like previous winners, markets that resemble previous wins, business models we've seen work before. This is a bias, and it costs us returns. The best-performing companies in our portfolio were the ones that made us most uncomfortable at the time of investment.
Your warm intro matters more than your deck. I hate this, but it's true. A mediocre deck with a strong intro gets a meeting. A brilliant deck from cold inbound gets skimmed. I'm trying to change this in how I work, but I'd be lying if I said the system has changed.
Some of the best companies I've passed on were passes I'd make again. Not because they were bad, but because they didn't fit our fund's strategy. A fantastic $100M-outcome company is a bad investment for a fund that needs $5B outcomes. The VC model is structurally biased against certain types of great companies.
Most fundraising advice is survivorship bias. The founder who raised $20M in two weeks is not giving you useful advice. They had some combination of warm intros, hot market, and prior exits that made their process completely unlike yours. Take their tips with a mountain of salt.
The system is getting better, slowly. More emerging managers, more diverse GPs, more alternative funding models (revenue-based financing, indie.vc-style structures, rolling funds). The old guard is being challenged. But the power law still governs, and as long as it does, the fundamental incentives that drive VC behavior won't change.
My inbox is open for founders who read this and have questions. I can't promise I'll respond to every deck — see the math above — but I promise that every deck I do review gets an honest assessment against these criteria. That's the least this industry owes you.
Fatima Al-Rashid is a Principal at a growth-stage venture fund based in Dubai and London. She reviews over 200 pitch decks monthly and has led or supported investments totaling over $180M across fintech, enterprise SaaS, and climate tech. The views expressed here are her own and do not represent her fund.