The pitch deck has a slide near the back that has caused more arguing than all the ones at the front put together, and it has nothing on it about the project at all.
It's the team slide. Four faces, four lines of text, and the quiet question sitting underneath it: can this lot actually finish the thing they've just spent nine slides describing?
I hadn't clocked that until someone with more experience than us read a draft and said, gently, that the fun part of a pitch is the idea and the deciding part is everything after it. Which reframed the whole document for me. I'd been building a case for the project. They're not really buying the project. They're buying the probability that a small group of people they've never met will still be standing, still speaking to each other, and still shipping in eighteen months' time.
That's an uncomfortable thing to make slides about. Our credibility isn't a list of shipped titles, because we don't have one. It's a demo that works and a year of not falling apart. You can't put "we didn't fall apart" on a slide. Believe me, I tried phrasing it about six ways.
The budget slide is its own flavour of exposure. Writing down what we think this costs — in front of people who have seen a hundred of these and know exactly which numbers are fantasy — feels like handing someone your homework knowing they've marked it before. Ask for too little and you've announced you don't understand the work. Too much and you've announced the same thing, differently. We landed somewhere honest and slightly terrifying and have decided to defend it rather than pad it.
And all of this is being assembled around a build we've deliberately left rougher than we want. Every time I open the deck I have to resist writing a small apology into the notes. Nobody's asked for one. It would just make me feel better, which is not a reason.
The odd part is how much I've enjoyed it. Not the slides — the thinking. We've had to say out loud what we're for, how much we need, and why us, and we'd never once written those down.
Deck goes out this week. Then, I'm told, we wait a very long time.
— Thiago, professional maker of slides now, apparently
Posted by Thiago Moreira · September 15, 2026
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