Guide · Layer 5

The Deck

Written for: seed / Series A scientist-founder

The deck’s job is orientation, not documentation: get a non-specialist to look closer, carry the conclusion and the reason to believe it, and route every detail to the model behind it. Don’t paste your spreadsheet onto a slide.

Build trust first, then reveal the number

The TEA on your slides is doing two things, in order. First, it builds confidence in the numbers, so a reader believes what they’re seeing. Only then does it share the figure that’s genuinely powerful. The temptation is to open with a big number to catch attention, but the reveal lands harder when you’ve teed up the trust first and brought the reader along — transparently, so they arrive at the number with you rather than being handed it.

When you do reveal it, ship a sentence, not a bare number — the figure plus the three things that make it mean something:

• Band — the ±~30% accuracy class. A bare point estimate reads as a promise you can’t keep
• Basis — the boundary, the capacity factor, how you annualized. “We beat the incumbent” is empty until both numbers sit on the same basis
• Drivers — the two or three inputs it rides on, straight from Layer 4

So: ”~$800/t (±~30%), gross of credits, cradle-to-gate boundary, ~90% capacity factor, driven by the power price.” That line carries the figure, its band, its basis, and its top driver; “$800/t” carries none of them. Match the resolution to what you actually know, too: the model returns “$805.27/t” because arithmetic keeps digits, but every input is a round anchor, so report ~$800/t ±~30%, not the false-precise figure (false precision catalogs the whole family).

🧭 Coach’s Read

Show gross and net side by side, always. A production credit can rival your entire gross cost — quote only the netted ~$260/t and you’ve hidden that the process makes it at ~$800/t and policy closes the rest. Anchor on gross; present net as the labeled upside it is, never as a quiet substitution.

Make every slide earn its place

Work arguments → charts → fill with the model, one assertion at a time:

• One assertion per slide, one chart to earn it — “here’s the cost wall we beat, and the one unit op that lets us beat it”
• Lead with the mechanism, not the magnitude — an investor believes a cost edge when you can point to which step is cheaper and why. A traceable “10x” beats a bald “40%” — 40% leaves no room the moment a real cost creeps in, and an unexplained 10x is its own red flag
• Bottom-up, not TAM/SAM/SOM — investors haircut every number you put in front of them. A bottom-up chart survives the haircut; a top-down market bubble doesn’t

🧭 Coach’s Read

The test for any chart: if it doesn’t change what someone would think or do, cut it — a deck full of true-but-inert charts still loses the room. And watch the danger sign: a deck number with nothing behind it. The slide opens the door; the model is what walks through it. A figure with no sourced model behind it collapses on the first diligence question, and you’ve spent your credibility instead of building it.

A few slides that travel

Most teams end up reaching for the same handful of pages. Treat these as canonical — worth setting up well once, then reusing:

• Market sizing, bottom-up — built from the unit economics up, with the buildup shown, not a top-down TAM bubble (a worked layout is on the backlog)
• Comparison against the incumbent — your cost or performance beside the industry standard, on a like-for-like basis: same boundary, same cost year, and a first-of-a-kind plant not quietly measured against a decades-optimized one. Never benchmark against the same incumbent figure you seeded the model from
• (more canonical pages to come — a fuller example library is on the backlog)

🧭 Coach’s Read

When a figure looks alarming, the instinct is to bury it — usually the wrong call. A founder I worked with wanted to delete a ~900% first-year ramp, sure it would scare investors off; but concealment reads as evasion, and a sharp reader redoes the arithmetic anyway — like leaving the GPA off a résumé. Show the awkward number, with the one line of context that makes it reasonable.