🧭 Where conviction leaks

Hey {{first_name|default:there}}, it’s Vadim 👋

I want to level with you.

For most people, pitch decks are not what gets them out of bed in the morning.

When you pursued your PhD, when you spent those long hours at the bench, when you took time away from your family to fly to a conference and stand by a poster - I bet it wasn’t because you dreamed of one day producing the perfect collection of PowerPoint slides.

You were trying to solve an important problem.

So I understand the reaction I get most often from founders. When a founder reaches out to me for help raising their round, and I ask about their deck, what I often get back is a knowing shrug: it's good enough.

And here's the tough part: at first glance, it usually is.

There's a science slide. A product slide. A clinical development overview. A team slide. Even a clean Ask slide. All the pieces I usually talk about - they're there.

And yet something is just... off.

Investors feel it too. They can't always name it, and they rarely have time to explain it, but they feel it - and then the energy in the conversation quietly begins to shift.

Here's what I've come to believe, after sitting on both sides of these conversations.

Before you polish a single slide, you need to make sure the story underneath it can carry the weight.

And for most founders, that’s where the real work begins: building a fundable story.

A story that goes beyond conveying information and achieves what a good deck is meant to do: build enough trust and conviction that an investor leans in and wants to learn more about your company, rather than politely watching from the sidelines.

The challenge with “good enough” decks is that their biggest problems are rarely obvious at first glance.

They tend to show up in the spaces between the slides, where the logic weakens, the investor has to connect the dots, and conviction quietly begins to leak out - often without the founder ever finding out where.

This is exactly what I'll be working on this week with a select group of founders in the Bio Founder GPS Pitch Deck Intensive, which kicks off Tuesday. Enrollment closes Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.

But for today, I want to help you begin identifying those gaps yourself.

🧭 HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER:

All right - let's find those leaks 🪣