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Should I Ask Potential Investors to Sign an NDA before I Share My Pitch Deck?
Startup Finance

Should I Ask Potential Investors to Sign an NDA before I Share My Pitch Deck?

Vic Kalchev's avatar
Vic Kalchev
Jan 10, 2025
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Should I Ask Potential Investors to Sign an NDA before I Share My Pitch Deck?
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In short, no.

Pitch decks shouldn't contain sensitive information requiring an NDA. Think of your pitch deck as a marketing tool with three versions:

  1. Teaser Deck: A concise version to pique investor interest and secure a meeting.

  2. Presentation Deck: A slightly expanded version with visuals and talking points for your meeting.

  3. Deep Dive Deck: A comprehensive version with detailed information and appendices, shared after the meeting.

Being largely marketing materials, pitch decks shouldn't contain anything warranting an NDA. While they cover sensitive topics like finance, strategy and proprietary technology, they never go too deep into the details.

Why are investors reluctant to sign NDAs?

NDAs are not a common practice in the context of early or growth-stage companies. There are two practical reasons:

  • Volume: Investors review countless decks. Managing NDAs for each would be impractical.

  • Timing: NDAs, being legal agreements, almost always have to go through Legal. This means months of delays and numerous revisions. This is bad for the investor and bad for you.

When I worked in corporate private equity, we'd occasionally get NDA requests from startups. To avoid major delays, we used to offer them our standard template, which of course was written in our favour.

Why NDAs don't make sense for you either

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