When Henry Ward, the CEO of Carta, was trying to raise an initial seed round for his software startup in 2013, he had never seen a successful pitch deck
He’d attend pitch competitions throughout San Francisco and read as many Medium posts by startup gurus — like the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham — as he could find. But the first slide deck he knew to have successfully raised venture funding was his own.
Ward, who’s since raised nearly $150 million for his equity-management software company, hopes to bring more transparency to the startup landscape, especially around fundraising.
In 2015, he shared his Series A pitch deck for Carta (which was initially known as eShares) with the public.
On Thursday, Ward shared an updated version of Carta’s investor deck with Business Insider — one that helped him raise an $80 million Series D round led by Meritech Capital last December that valued the company at $800 million
