The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.
Every week, thousands of founders open Canva or Google Slides or, God help them, PowerPoint, and begin the ritual. They agonize over fonts. They nudge logos three pixels to the left. They workshop whether the TAM slide should come before or after the team slide, as though the ordering of these particular runes determines whether capital flows // doesn't. They search "pitch deck template YC" and download something that looks exactly like every other deck built from a template found by searching "pitch deck template YC." They use Claude Opus to generate slide decks, or Gamma to beautify scripts.
And it's a near-pointless activity.
I've sat through hundreds of pitches at this point and I can tell you with some confidence that the "quality" of the deck is inversely correlated with the quality of the thinking behind it.
William Zinsser argued in On Writing Well that the act of writing forces clarity - because you can't write a clear sentence about a thing you don't understand. The principle applies to startup pitches. I've met founders who could deliver a flawless twenty-minute deck, who completely fall apart when asked to write two paragraphs explaining their competitive advantage.
The deck was performance, and the writing would have been proof.
Pitch decks are a format optimized for the wrong thing. The entire medium is built around a synchronous, performative moment, and that moment, as it turns out, is a shit way to evaluate whether a business makes sense.
But we keep using them.
why?
Part of the reason: venture ecosystem runs on pattern-matching, and the 10-slide deck is a pattern everyone recognizes. Funds have intake processes built around decks. Analysts have workflows for reviewing them. Entire cottage industries exist for deck design, deck feedback, deck optimization. The pitch deck is load-bearing infrastructure in a system that doesn't love change.
But the deeper reason is that nobody has proposed a credible replacement, a format that carries the same information with less artifice and more signal. I'd argue there's an obvious one.
Write a pitch.md file instead.
A plain markdown file. The argument for why your company should exist, written in plain text, structured with headers, readable by humans and machines alike - readable in a terminal if it comes to that.
Make it live in a repository next to your actual code, your README, your documentation. In the McLuhan sense, the medium's message is: _this company builds things and writes things down clearly.
Writing and thinking are functionally the same activity, or close enough that the distinction doesn't matter. When you build a pitch deck, you're arranging fragments. A bullet point here, a chart there, a big number on a slide by itself for dramatic effect. The format actively discourages connected reasoning. You don't have to build an argument that flows from one paragraph to the next because you don't have paragraphs. You have slides, and slides are designed to be self-contained units of impression. The result is that pitch decks test your ability to create impressions, which is a real skill but not the skill that determines whether your business will work.
Writing a pitch.md forces you to make the connections explicit. If your market analysis doesn't logically lead to your product thesis, you can't hide that gap behind a slide transition. The gap sits there on the page, visible // embarrassing // useful.
Markdown is the native format of the people you're actually trying to reach. The best technical investors I know, the ones at the firms that reliably pick winners, don't want to sit through your deck.
AI tools parse markdown trivially. A VC running deal flow through any Claude Code // literally any automated pipeline (and most serious funds are building these pipelines right now) can ingest a pitch.md, cross-reference it against a live repo, check claims against observable data, and surface inconsistencies in seconds.
The deck was created for human eyeballs scanning in three minutes and forty-four seconds. A pitch.md file is for a world where the first reader might not be human at all, and where the second reader, the partner who actually writes checks, wants substance they can verify rather than styling they can admire.
They want to read something. They want to forward something to their partner with a note that says "read this, what do you think." A pdf of your Keynote presentation is a terrible artifact for that purpose. It's bloated, it's archaic, half the slides don't make sense if you ignore the meaningless diagrams, and nobody is going to read thirty fucking slides on their phone while waiting for coffee anyway. A markdown file is small, format-independent, and (this matters more than people realise) greppable.
It's honest too, for whatever that's worth. Markdown strips away the ability to design your way out of a weak argument. In a deck, you can make a questionable claim feel authoritative by putting it in 72-point Helvetica on a dark background with a lot of whitespace. In a markdown file, a questionable claim looks like exactly what it is: a sentence that needs to be better.
The format is a forcing function for rigor.
If you can't explain your idea clearly in writing, you probably can't explain it clearly at all, and if you can't explain it clearly at all, you probaly don't understand it well enough to build it.
If you haven't written your pitch as a plain document, as words on a page making an argument, you're skipping the hardest and most valuable part of the process. In my experience, the founders who've done that homework give better pitches anyway, because they actually know what they're talking about, and that comes through regardless of whether your slides have drop shadows.
Write the pitch.md first. You might find you don't need the deck at all, or you might find that when you do build the deck, it's better, because you finally know what you're trying to say.