The 2025 Five Slide Pitch Deck
Mastering the Five-Slide Pitch Deck in 2025: A Guide for Founders
At Gula Tech Adventures, we’ve reviewed hundreds of startup pitches—some brilliant, others not so much. One thing we’ve learned? Simplicity wins. That’s why we created the Five-Slide Pitch Deck—a focused framework to help entrepreneurs clearly and effectively pitch their big ideas to investors.
In this updated 2025 version, Ron Gula and our animated assistant VC Bot walk through the structure, rationale, and examples behind the five-slide deck, especially tailored for today's landscape where cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and data privacy are more important than ever. Whether you’re solving for phishing, building the next anti-gravity platform (yes, really), or creating secure offline communications, these five slides will keep your pitch sharp and aligned.
Why Five Slides?
Three reasons: Time, Accuracy, and Lifecycle.
Time: As a founder, your time is limited. You’re juggling product development, customer conversations, team management, and fundraising. A concise pitch saves time—yours and the investor’s—by focusing on what really matters.
Accuracy: VCs have specific theses and strategies. A clear five-slide deck ensures that what you do is communicated without confusion. Remember the childhood game “telephone”? The same thing happens with pitches when your story isn’t sharp.
Lifecycle: Fundraising isn’t a one-time transaction. It’s the beginning of a long-term relationship. A solid pitch gives investors confidence in your communication style, decision-making, and vision.
The Five Slides, Explained
1. What Problem Do You Solve?
Your startup needs to address a problem your ideal customer and investor recognize. This slide should be crisp and direct. For example:
"Villages are overrun with mice."
It doesn’t get clearer than that.
2. How Do You Solve It?
This is where you show what makes your solution unique—without jargon, secrecy, or buzzword salad. You should be able to explain your “how” without an NDA.
"I play smooth jazz on a saxophone that lures mice out of town."
It’s quirky. But it’s clear, and it differentiates from the “flute guy” competition.
3. What’s the Proof?
Can you show that your solution works? This could be a paying customer, a pilot program, a patent, an award, or even a working prototype. Investors want evidence you’re more than just a cool idea.
"Three towns are mouse-free thanks to my music."
It might be anecdotal, but it’s still some proof.
4. What’s Your Ask?
How much are you raising, and what will you do with the capital? Be specific. Avoid vague goals like “growth” or “scale.”
"I’m raising 100,000 gold pieces to train AI models that predict optimal times to play jazz for mice control."
Your ask shows you're strategic and realistic.
5. What’s Your Vision of Success?
This is often the hardest slide. Where do you see your company in five years? What does the world look like if you succeed?
"Villages are mouse-free and vibing to 24/7 smooth AI-generated jazz."
Your vision should be compelling, achievable, and bold enough to excite the right kind of investors.
Real-Life Examples (and Mistakes)
In the video, four fictional startups pitched their ideas to VC Bot, with entertaining results:
Quantum Fortune Cookies claimed to predict the future… a few seconds ahead. Cool, but hard to scale. It’s a metaphor for startups marginally better than market leaders but lacking true differentiation.
Anti-Gravity Apple Pickers had breakthrough tech with unclear ambition. Instead of leveraging anti-gravity to revolutionize logistics or emergency response, they insisted on focusing solely on safer apple-picking. Investors wanted more.
Kaiju Detection Industries claimed they could detect Godzilla but provided no clear “how” and dubious proof. Their pitch mirrored many threat intelligence startups that track niche risks without broader application.
Crypto-Gapped Computing nailed the five-slide structure. Their problem (secure corporate communication), solution (a physically isolated mobile device), proof (no successful red team compromises), ask ($10M for expansion), and vision (corporate-grade secure communications for non-government organizations) hit all the marks. This is the kind of startup Gula Tech Adventures would seriously consider.
Common Pitch Pitfalls
The video also covers what not to include in your five-slide pitch—especially in an initial meeting:
Your entire advisory board
Founders' resumes
Projected revenues
Market size stats
Competitive tear-downs
These details can be useful later in due diligence, but up front they often distract from the core story. Worse, they might trigger disagreements or misalignment with investors who have their own opinions about the market, team, or trajectory.
A Word on AI Startups
2025 is the year of AI everything. That means if your pitch involves AI, it needs to be extra precise.
Here’s what Gula Tech Adventures looks for in an AI pitch:
Whose AI are you using? Are you licensing OpenAI APIs or training your own?
Is it cost-effective? Running an LLM on every email might sound cool—but is it profitable at scale?
Can it be deployed offline or on-prem? This affects security, performance, and cost.
How fast is the AI ecosystem changing? Your vision should reflect your understanding of model evolution, GPU costs, and emerging regulations.
Example: One portfolio company built a phishing prevention engine using a lightweight local LLM—far more cost-effective than cloud-based competitors. That’s the kind of insight investors love.
Final Thoughts
A five-slide pitch won’t close a round by itself, but it’s your entry ticket to the conversation. It tells a story. It builds trust. It sets the tone for everything that follows.
Want to practice? Check out our animated Five Slide Pitch Deck Competition, where characters like Bigfoot and the Predator pitched to VC Bot and learned the hard way what works—and what doesn’t.
If you’re working on a startup—especially in AI or cybersecurity—and can answer all five pitch questions with clarity and confidence, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at investor@gula.tech to get in touch.
Until then, pitch smart, pitch short—and always bring the jazz.