The ‘ask and use of funds’ slide is a chance to shine as a founder. Do not waste it.

There’s one slide that just about each founder will get incorrect when they’re placing collectively a pitch deck to lift cash from enterprise capitalists. The slide is often generally known as “the ask,” and it sometimes lives towards the tip of the pitch deck.
It’s meant to do one thing fairly simple: Clarify how a lot cash a startup is elevating and for what. It shouldn’t be rocket science, but it surely’s virtually universally a wrestle to get proper.
Listed below are the commonest errors:
- Forgetting to incorporate the slide altogether.
- Not naming a selected greenback quantity you might be elevating.
- Together with a valuation on the slide.
- Omitting what the funds might be used for.
- Itemizing a selected runway, i.e., “This can hold us working for 18 to 24 months.”
Let’s discover intimately why these errors are so detrimental to your fundraising course of and how one can finest embody these factors in your deck.