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This the pitch deck that helped Rewind AI close a $350M Series A in 2023. It's a benchmark example of a modern pitch deck. Clear, concise, and compelling. The deck comprises 29 slides that founder Dan Siroker covers in just 7 minutes and 48 seconds in his video presentation. The pitch deck transcript scores a 2nd Grade reading level — simple enough for a 7-year-old child to understand.
Read on for a slide-by-slide teardown.
29 slides in 7 minutes and 48 seconds!
"We founded Rewind in March 2020, but in the last few months our business has taken off. It's not surprising that we've been inundated by investors. We don't have time to move with everyone so instead we're going to do something pretty atypical: We're going to share our investor presentation with the world. More than anything we hope that this transparency builds trust in us by ourcustomers. If after watching our presentation you happen to want to invest visit rewind.ai/invest. So here it goes."
Opens with traction — exponential 'hockey stick' growth. Whatever they're selling, people love it.
Reference to 'inundated by investors' creates investor FOMO.
Sharing the deck publicly shows high confidence that creates more FOMO. Open competition pushes investors to move fast and make their first offer their best offer.
Unlike most 'cover' slides, there's no mention of the company name or product value proposition, but no matter in this instance because the hockey stick growth grabs attention and creates anticipation.
"I'm Dan Siroker the co-founder and CEO of Rewind. I started to go deaf in my 20s and when I turned 30 I tried a hearing aid for the first time. It changed my life. To lose a sense and gain it back again feels like gaining a superpower. Ever since that moment I have been on a hunt for ways that technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers. That led me to memory…"
Great pitch decks start with an authentic origin story.
Dan does a nice job generalizing his personal experience to a broad category of tech products that augment human capabilities and give users 'superpowers.'
The closing line starts to hint at the first obvious question: What do they do?
Here and throughout the deck, Dan uses clean segues to set up the following slide and/or opens a slide with a rhetorical question to establish the next section of the pitch.
"Studies show that ninety percent of memories are forgotten after just one week. Just like our hearing our memory gets worse as we get older. But does it have to?"
Defines the using clear and simple data.
Uses one slide with one simple visual per takeaway. Each slide is visible for 1-2 seconds.
Cites reputable sources.
Closing line sets up the segue to the solution by challenging the status quo.
"If we have glasses for vision and hearing aids for hearing what's the equivalent for memory? What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing? That question is why we founded Rewind."
Starts the segue to a solution for memory loss using familiar real world examples of similar problems — and their solutions — that any investor can relate to.
Uses simple analogies. Positions 'memory' as a problem that should be solved by technology the same way the hearing problem is solved by hearing aids.
Uses the 'rule of three.' Psychology shows that ideas given in threes are especially interesting and memorable to an audience.
There are just six words on this slide. Less than 10 words per slide is a recurrent theme in this exceptionally concise deck.
"Our vision is to give humans Perfect Memory."
Provides a company vision using four simple, memorable words.
The vision — plus the prior problem statements — frame what Rewind does at the highest level.
We still need to know what it is, who uses it, and how it works, but that's likely coming soon.
So far, Dan has spent less than 90 seconds on his pitch. In that short time he's covered traction (hockey stick growth), problem (memory loss) and high-level solution ('Perfect Memory').
"The first step toward this Vision was building an incredible team. Our team has worked at companies like Google Apple Facebook Twitter Spotify, Dropbox and Optimizely. Optimizely is the company I founded in 2010 and grew to 450 employees and 120 million in annual recurring revenue. Together, our team has built Rewind."
Introduces the team early.
Great ideas need great execution. Great execution requires a team with relevant experience and expertise.
Using logos is a quick way to establish that team members have worked at successful startups and are likely to have the startup, product, and company building experience required to get Rewind to their first $100M and beyond.
This is not Dan's first rodeo. He has first-hand experience growing a startup from concept to $120M in ARR.
"What's Rewind? It's a co-pilot for your mind."
xxx
"It works by capturing anything you've seen said or heard and making it searchable. We do this by doing optical character recognition on your screen and automated speech recognition on the audio that comes in through your microphone or speaker audio output. We store all of this locally on your machine."
What it does in one short, simple sentence.
How it works in three simple sentences that support the simple visual — show and tell.
Everything in plain English. No technobabble.
The transcript for this one slide — a painfully complex slide in many pitch decks — is at a Grade 4 reading level*. The transcript as a whole is even simpler with a Grade 2 reading level.
"We integrate with GPT4 to let you ask any question about anything you've seen said or heard. We do this with a privacy first approach: no screen or audio recordings ever leave your machine. The best way to bring this to life is with a demo."
More on how it works. Again, very simple language. We now know where AI comes in.
Proactively addresses an unspoken objection about privacy (though I'm personally left wondering how this works when I use multiple devices like my laptop and phone).
Describes how the AI piece works by example which works better than describing features and workflows in the abstract.
More use of the rule of three.
Segues to a live demo. Show and tell with a real product.
A demo is the easiest way to show what a product does.
A live demo also shows that the product is real and provides insights into the team's ability to build a product that is both useful (solves a problem) and usable (great UX/UI).
"What makes Rewind unique? Three things. First is our privacy first approach we store everything locally not in the cloud. Next is it's frictionless. We use your screen and microphone no authentication or integration is required with any of silos of your data. Last is search. Our philosophy is that we capture everything so you don't need foresight, you don't need to know what to take notes on you, just capture everything and go back and search for it later."
Provides unique features as a proxy for competitive differentiation.
Again, uses the rule of three. The three unique features are easy to say, understand, and remember.
"What makes us unique in artificial intelligence is the unique set of data that we have. Everything you've seen or heard is a unique set of data that makes it very valuable for you to be able to ask questions and essentially be a co-pilot for your mind. We also are very capital efficient. We don't train large language models. We stand on the shoulders of giants and integrate with solutions like Open AI's GPT4."
More differentiation.
Uses familiar product categories and well-known category leaders to illustrate differences.
Reinforces the product tag line: 'The co-pilot for your mind.'
"Why now? This was only possible because of Apple silicon. We take advantage of every aspect of Apple silicon system on a chip design and without it our product would not be as imperceptible as it is today. Rewind runs in the background you don't even realize it's running."
Here, as on most slides, Dan proactively asks ands answers a common question. Why is now a great time for a solution like this? And why hasn't anyone done this before?
Also proactively answers an obvious objection: Will this product be a resource hog that slows my device to a crawl?
"Who's our ideal customer?"
Nice use of a transition slide.
We now know what Rewind is (co-pilot for our mind), what problem it solves (forgetting stuff), and how it works (video/audio data capture from our laptop with AI search).
Now we need to understand who needs this product and how they use it.
"We call them context switchers. These are people juggling personal and professional work across multiple silos, apps, projects, teams, etc. They fall into categories like Executives, Engineers, Consultants, Investors, Marketers, etc. But this is a really broad solution so there's a long tale of different users."
Gives their target user a memorable name:: 'context switchers.'
Defines target users by profession plus a propensity to work in many contexts. Prospecting databases like Zoom Info make it very easy to build prospect lists by title.
"What do they use Rewind for? Well, two things. The first is finding anything you've seen said or heard. That might be simple as asking what was that article I read? Was it on Twitter? Was it an email? Was it in Slack? We help you find it across all those different silos. And secondly they use us to turn their past into action. You can simply ask it to write an email based off of context of your past."
Having defined who uses Rewind, we now see the two most common use cases.
Provides simple, tangible examples for each of the two primary use cases.
"Our go-to-market strategy is Product-Led Growth."
Another transition slide.
Having covered target customers and how they use the product, it's time to discuss how to make these folks aware of Rewind and convince them to buy the product.
Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a popular GTM strategy because it gives potential customers a risk-free chance to try before they buy.
"What does that mean to us? We ship product. In fact we ship 11 new releases a day. We do this by deeply empathizing with our customers trying to understand the problems they have and then innovating on their behalf and building a delightful solution that wows them."
Provides a few short, simple sentences that clearly establish Rewind as a customer-first company focused on solving thorny problems with innovative solutions that delight and wow customers.
The '11 releases a day' metric conveys a nimble and responsive product team and development process.
"Turns out it works. Folks like Patrick Collison take a look at our product, say this looks super cool, share it with their followers, and soon we had thousands of users across the world."
Uses an anecdote to illustrate how the PLG model is working well for Rewind.
Underscores the viral nature of the product.
Nice name drop with Patrick Collison, the billionaire co-founder of Stripe. Subtext: This product is attracting the attention of tech thought leaders.
"One way we make it very easy for these users to try our product is through a frictionless usage-based free trial. This helps them prove the value of the product before they have to pay. We have two paid plans. Rewind Basic and Rewind Pro. With Rewind Basic you get 10 rewinds per month. With Rewind Pro you get unlimited rewinds, priority access to new features, and you actually get my cell phone number as well."
Clear, simple pricing model to show how they make money.
Free trials make it simple for anyone to try before they buy.
Dan providing his cell phone number to Pro customers demonstrates his commitment to customer feedback.
"Here's the split and retention of our users by these different paid plans. 91.5% of our users use us for free. 1.2% pay for the basic plan. And 7.3% pay for the Pro Plan. The retention for these plans have been fantastic. 98% of basic users are still retained and 96% of pro users are still retained."
The success of any PLG product is measured in part by conversion (free to paid) and retention rates. And here they are.
These retention numbers show that Rewind has achieved PMF (Product-Market Fit), a prerequisite for growth.
I'd have added some industry benchmark context for the conversion rates, but the retention rates need no further explanation. I might also have added some product usage metrics to confirm that users use Rewind frequently over an extended period of time.
"If you use the percentage split we see between our basic and probe plans and apply it to the entire market of knowledge workers, which is about a billion people, globally our entire market size is $32B of annual recurring revenue. That's a huge amount of money and we're only getting started."
Clearly states market size using a simple bottom-up calculation.
This makes it easy to figure out how much market share Rewind would need to hit interesting revenue numbers.
$32B is a nice number and is easy to see from the simple math.
Some pitch decks tie themselves in knots over TAM/SAM/SOM. I prefer this bottom-up approach. TAM = Total customer count x Average ARR per customers.
"Today we have $707,000 in annual recurring revenue, so we have a long way to go but we're really excited about the path that we're on. And while it might seem like it's an overnight success we've been at this for three years."
Traction speaks louder than words.
$707K in ARR, coupled with the retention metrics shared earlier, show that Rewind has built a customer acquisition and retention engine that works on a small scale.
They are clearly ready for more money to leverage their first-mover advantage, scale the growth engine, and establish themselves as the de facto market leader.
"The unit economics of our business is very strong. Our customer acquisition cost is about $3 and our lifetime value is $475 and so the LTV to CAC is about 160."
3 big numbers. Rule of three redux.
CAC to LTV is a popular SaaS metric that measures customer acquisition efficiency.
CAC is typically the total combined cost of all Marketing and Sales payroll and program expense in a given period.
LTV is the lifetime value (average contract term x average contract value) of all customers acquired in that same period.
LTV > 3x CAC is good, 160x is exceptional.
"We're also very capital efficient. We have 90% gross margins last year. We raised 10 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital and we still have 9.5 million of that still in the bank which give us about three years of runway."
Another simple slide with 3 big numbers. Rule of three.
Typical SaaS gross margins are in the 70-85% range, so Rewind is outperforming it's SaaS peers.
The A16Z and First Round Capital name drops are nice. Top tier VCs have already invested, presumably having done their due diligence. More investor FOMO.
'3 years of runway' says Rewind does not need money right now. They are in the driver's seat for this round. Investors will need to offer a high valuation to get in on the deal.
"Our roadmap is very exciting. We've shipped our Mac app and Ask Rewind (guessing that's the AI search interface) today. We're also focused on meetings. In the future we're going to ship an app for Apple Glasses (which will launch likely this summer at WWDC), iPhone, and Windows. Eventually we'll get to building cloud backup and sync in a very safe and privacy sensitive way also getting to Android and eventually to the Enterprise."
A delightfully simple roadmap.
Rule of 3 twice in one slide — impressive!
3 timelines (Now, Soon, Later) with 3 major deliverables per timeline.
Nice use of logos for visual interest and to streamline the slide.
"Our hope is if we're successful our product will be as ubiquitous as a hearing aid is for hearing and glasses are for vision."
Closes with a reminder of the vision and huge market potential.
"If you're interested in investing please visit rewind.ai/invest. Thank you very much."
The invest url (see next slide) states 'We don't have time to meet with everyone so instead we're sharing our investor presentation with the world.' It's a bold move that is likely to drive a feeding frenzy of motivated investors.
This approach would not work for a first-time founder with no MVP and/or no PMF. The strength of the story, coupled with Dan's credentials, makes this bold approach possible.
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