I've seen a lot of seed decks and quite frankly while they may have many similar slides (summary, problem, solution, team, etc) I've noticed that the ones that

I've seen a lot of seed decks and quite frankly while they may have many similar slides (summary, problem, solution, team, etc) I've noticed that the ones that get funded have one of the following: 1) Social proof 2) Significant Traction That's it. In fact I'd go as far to say that without either of those, you won't get funded period, except through lucky angel connections. In fact I can't think of a case of something getting funded without one of these. Social proof is typically something of the form of the founders being 3 PhDs in something hot from insert-top-school, or there's a co-founder with a previous successful exit, or there's a top notch advisory board of semi-famous or at least provably successful people. So when Mr. VC throws his money at this startup, hey it's in the hands of the best. Traction is the other option, and is the typical desired hockey stick graph of users, revenue, deals, whatever. The traction metric often maps really well onto software startups specifically, because very limited labor and capital can lead to real results. Meanwhile for larger enterprises that require legitimate development and manpower to get traction - it's going to be tough to show traction before you have the resources to deliver something. So something like a "nuclear power startup" (which YC has funded for instance) would probably rely more on social proof. It's a tad disheartening because it makes something like non-consumer hardware a very difficult spot to be in if you're a younger entrepreneur. Maybe an incubator/accelerator (plus personal savings) can get you on the order of $100K, but that's often not enough to prove real traction. And unless you have significant social proof (often not the case for a younger first time founder), then it seems you're going to be stuck in a vast fundraising chasm between $100K and $1M, e.g. between accelerator and seed financing. In particular I'd be interested to hear people's take on hardware startups in this respect. Consumer hardware has the recently developed option of crowdfunding to bridge this gap. But what about industrial hardware, like a piece of smart machinery, or something in robotics that isn't a sub-$1K developer kit? Maybe then traction looks like a big deal or two that the crafty entrepreneurs are able to hustle. Anyways, good overall deck template but I don't think people should be under the impression that a good deck is a huge piece of the puzzle. It's social proof and/or traction, plain and simple.