The Ritualistic Imitation of Success

My left eye is twitching in a rhythm that matches the blinking cursor on slide 9, and the blue light of the monitor at 3:19 AM has turned the coffee on my desk into a stagnant pool of dark oil. I am staring at a blog post-one of those ‘The 10-Slide Deck That Raised $500 Million’ pieces-and then I’m staring at my own deck, and the two things don’t share the same DNA. It’s like trying to weld a titanium plate to a piece of rotting plywood using a soldering iron designed for circuit boards. I’ve spent 19 hours this week trying to fit a company that aims to change the molecular recycling of plastics into a template meant for a social media app that helps people find the best place to buy sourdough bread. It’s a specialized form of self-torture, this ritualistic imitation of success, and I suspect I’m not the only one currently losing my mind in the gaps between the bullet points.

We look at the Airbnb deck or the Uber deck or the early Sequoia-backed winners from 2009 and we treat them like holy relics. We think that if we use the same font, the same 19-word limit on the ‘Problem’ slide, and the same specific sequence of information, the money will naturally flow from the sky. It is the purest expression of a cargo cult I have seen in the modern era.

Aesthetics Over Structure

I remember once, about 29 months ago, I was working on a high-pressure valve for a client who insisted that the weld seam look ‘exactly like the ones on the SpaceX rockets.’ I spent 49 hours trying to explain that the SpaceX rockets use a friction stir welding process that requires a $9,999,999 machine and an environment controlled down to the micron. He was asking me to do it with a hand-held TIG torch in a garage in Ohio.

He eventually hired someone else who just ground down the weld and polished it until it was shiny, hiding the fact that the penetration was shallow and the joint was brittle. It failed at 399 PSI. The same thing happens in your pitch deck. You polish the slides to look like a unicorn’s early materials, but you’re hiding the brittle joints of a business model that hasn’t been tested in the current atmosphere.

The Sterilization of Context

Studying a famous pitch deck is like studying a finished sculpture and ignoring the 199 tons of marble that were chipped away to find it. You see the 10 slides, but you don’t see the 19 iterations that came before them. You don’t see the 49 conversations the founders had with skeptical mentors who told them their ‘Problem’ slide was incoherent. By the time a deck becomes ‘famous’ and gets circulated on LinkedIn, it has been stripped of its context.

This is the psychological toll of the cargo cult. We stop building our business and start building a performance of a business. We start looking for the ‘magic’ slide that will bypass the need for a solid product-market fit. We believe the ritual will save us from the hard, messy, singular work of explaining why we specifically exist right now.

Signaling Generic Thinking

Investors have seen the ‘Airbnb for X’ slide 999 times this year alone. They can smell the template from the first three seconds of the presentation. When you use a generic structure, you are signaling that your thinking is also generic. You are telling them that you are a follower of the ritual, not a builder of the future. The irony is that the decks we most admire-the ones we try to copy-were often successful because they broke the rules of their own time.

Fighting Inertia, Not Clones

I’m looking at my slide 9 again. It’s the ‘Competition’ slide. I’ve put my competitors in a little 2×2 grid where I am in the top right corner. Everyone does this. It’s the most ritualistic slide in the history of the world. It’s a lie, though. In reality, my biggest competitor isn’t the three companies in the bottom left quadrant; it’s the status quo. It’s the fact that my customers have been doing things the same way for 49 years and they are tired and don’t want to change. My ‘Competitor’ isn’t a company; it’s inertia. But the ’10-Slide Template’ doesn’t have a box for inertia.

We need to stop building straw runways. The venture capital landscape of 2024 is not the landscape of 2019 or 2009. Investors are looking for the ‘weld’-the moment where the founder’s obsession meets a massive market need in a way that is structurally sound. They want to know if you actually understand the molecular structure of the problem you are solving, or if you’re just someone who knows how to use Canva.

Returning to the Workshop

I’m going to delete slide 9. In fact, I’m going to delete the whole 19-slide monstrosity I’ve built over the last 9 days. I’m going to go back to the workshop. I’m going to look at the ‘metal’-the raw data, the actual customer conversations, the specific technical breakthroughs we’ve made.

If it takes 13 slides or 29 slides, so be it. If it doesn’t look like the Airbnb deck, that’s probably a good sign. It means I’m finally building something that can actually fly, rather than just waiting for the birds to notice my straw runway.

This shift in perspective is crucial, recognizing that specialized engineering-whether mechanical or narrative-demands context-specific design, such as the services offered by the architects behind professional pitch structuring, like pitch deck agency.

“There is a certain kind of peace that comes with admitting you were wrong. I admit it: I fell for the cargo cult. I thought the ritual would protect me from the fear of being seen for what I am-a person with a difficult, messy, incomplete idea that just might work.”

The template was a shield. But shields are heavy and they don’t help you build. They only help you hide. And in the world of high-stakes welding or high-stakes fundraising, hiding is the quickest way to get burned.