Unsurprisingly, excellent advice phrased as succinctly as it could be for such an enormous topic.
I'm glad Paul Graham think that decks are on the way out, because they're a ludicrous (or at least inefficient) way of understanding what a startup does. If you have a product, show me that. If you have financials, show me those. Otherwise it becomes a competition to see which companies can dedicate their design resources to make the prettiest deck, and which investors can do the math on your '30% growth' number to figure out that you're growing from 3 to 4 users.
The advice about valuation is also great. I listened in on a conversation with very smart founders who are used to optimizing things, and they were super concerned about having a great pre-money valuation. It's tempting to focus on it because it's your only benchmark at a really stressful stage, but if things go badly it won't matter, and if things go really well it... won't matter either.
Another problem with emailing decks is that investors read them and decide, without much feedback to the founders. When founders can talk through the deck interactively with investors, they can learn which parts work and which don't, and what questions are unanswered.
I think showing the product alone works well only if the investor is in the target audience. I just met with an entrepreneur who has what I believe is a great product, but the investors he has talked with so far are just not going to be users of it.
In his case, I think having a couple of slides to help demonstrate the problem is very helpful. Otherwise there isn't a sufficient aha moment when he gets to the solution.
Certainly the business case is important to lay out, especially in the case you describe. Many decks don't do that though - they don't stand alone without a verbal pitch. They lack context and sometimes even topic headings.
I've seen many decks that have a page with a heading like "Opportunity" and a number (along with the obligatory graph going up and to the right). What is that? Competitor sales? Expected market share? Entire market size? Even if the investor is watching you pitch out loud, they may refer back to the deck and find they have forgotten what you said about that slide.
I'm glad Paul Graham think that decks are on the way out, because they're a ludicrous (or at least inefficient) way of understanding what a startup does. If you have a product, show me that. If you have financials, show me those. Otherwise it becomes a competition to see which companies can dedicate their design resources to make the prettiest deck, and which investors can do the math on your '30% growth' number to figure out that you're growing from 3 to 4 users.
The advice about valuation is also great. I listened in on a conversation with very smart founders who are used to optimizing things, and they were super concerned about having a great pre-money valuation. It's tempting to focus on it because it's your only benchmark at a really stressful stage, but if things go badly it won't matter, and if things go really well it... won't matter either.