The Sequoia Pitch Deck Template Is 10 Slides
As Sequoia Capital publishes it today, the template is: Company purpose, Problem, Solution, Why now, Market potential, Competition and alternatives, Business model, Team, Financials, Vision. It comes from Sequoia's own "Writing a Business Plan" guide, and it has outlived nearly every deck fad that arrived after it.
If you are raising in 2026 and you want a structure a partner can read in four minutes without asking what your company does, this is still the one to copy. You can see the same skeleton across the pitch deck library on Round Funded, where 370+ real decks are grouped by industry and round.
The template is not a design system. It is an argument in a fixed order: here is a broken thing, here is why it is breakable now, here is the size of the prize, here is why we are the ones who take it. Founders rarely lose the room on slide design. They lose it by shipping the ten slides in the wrong order, or by turning slide 3 into slide 7.
The Template Changed, and Most Articles Still List the Old One
This is the part almost every "Sequoia pitch deck template" article gets wrong, including the PDFs that circulate on SlideShare and Scribd.
The version everyone reproduces is a 2015-era copy of Sequoia's old page. Sequoia's current guidance is not identical to it:
| 2015 reproduction (what most articles list) | Sequoia today | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Company Purpose | Company purpose | Same |
| Problem | Problem | Same |
| Solution | Solution | Same |
| Why Now | Why now | Same |
| Market Size | Market potential | Reframed from size to potential |
| Competition | Competition and alternatives | Broadened to include what people do instead |
| Product | removed | No longer its own section |
| Business Model | Business model | Same |
| Team | Team | Same |
| Financials | Financials | Same |
| not present | Vision | Added as the closing section |
Still ten sections, but two of them are different. If you are working from a downloaded template, you are building a Product slide Sequoia no longer asks for and skipping the Vision slide it now closes on.
The two renames are not cosmetic either. "Market potential" invites a bottom-up build rather than a big circle, and "Competition and alternatives" forces you to name the spreadsheet or the intern that your buyer uses today, not just the two funded startups in your category.
The 10 Slides, One by One
| # | Slide | What it must answer | The usual failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Company purpose | What you do, in one sentence, no jargon | A mission statement instead of a description |
| 2 | Problem | Whose pain, and what they do today instead | Describing a market, not a person |
| 3 | Solution | Why your approach removes that pain | A feature list |
| 4 | Why now | What changed in the last 24 months | "AI is big" with no specific unlock |
| 5 | Market potential | Bottom-up, from real units and prices | A top-down $50B circle |
| 6 | Competition and alternatives | Named rivals plus the status quo | "No direct competitors" |
| 7 | Business model | Who pays, how much, how often | Revenue projections instead of a model |
| 8 | Team | Why this team, for this problem | Logos with no relevance |
| 9 | Financials | Traction to date and the ask | A five-year hockey stick, no ask |
| 10 | Vision | What the world looks like if this works | Skipping it, or repeating slide 1 |
Four of these carry most of the weight.
Company purpose is the sentence a partner repeats to colleagues when you are not in the room. If it needs a preamble, rewrite it. Airbnb's 2008 seed deck opened with "Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels", which is a complete company in nine words. That deck raised a $600K seed and it is in the table below.
Why now is where most 2026 decks are weakest. The question is not why the problem matters, it is why it became solvable in the last two years. A cost curve moved, a regulation changed, a model got good enough, a behaviour flipped. Name the unlock. "The market is growing" is not one.
Market potential should be built from the bottom up. Number of buyers, times what they pay you, times how often. A slice of an analyst's number tells the partner you have not done the arithmetic, and they will do it in their head while you talk.
Vision is the slide the stale templates dropped, and it is the reason the deck ends on ambition rather than a spreadsheet. One slide, no numbers: what is true about the world in ten years if you win.
Real Decks That Follow the Sequoia Shape
The fastest way to learn the template is to read decks that used it and raised. These are the actual files, not reconstructions:
| Deck | Round | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Airbnb | Seed 2008, $600K | Company purpose in one line, market built bottom-up |
| Uber | Seed 2008, $1.3M | Why now built on smartphone penetration, not vibes |
| Coinbase | Seed 2012, $600K | A problem slide for a product nobody had heard of |
| Series B 2004, $10M | Business model written before the revenue existed | |
| Front | Series A 2016, $10M | A competition slide that names rivals directly |
Note the round sizes. Four of these five raised on a deck that would look small today, which is the point: the template does not need a big number to work. It needs the ten answers.
Browse 370+ real pitch decks from funded startups on Round Funded
The Five Ways Founders Break the Template
- Merging Problem and Solution. They become one slide, and the partner never feels the pain before you relieve it. Keep them separate even when it feels repetitive.
- Skipping Why now. In a category with twenty new entrants, this is the slide that separates you from the other nineteen. Cutting it to save space is the most expensive edit in the deck.
- Claiming no competition. Every partner reads this as "has not looked". Sequoia's own heading now says alternatives, so name the spreadsheet people use today, then say what you do differently in one line.
- Putting the ask on slide 1. The ask belongs on Financials, after the argument. On slide 1 it reads as a request; at the end it reads as a conclusion.
- Adding slides. An appendix is fine. A 24-slide main deck is not. If a slide does not answer one of the ten questions, it is an appendix slide.
Build Your Deck in an Afternoon
- Start with real decks. Open the pitch deck library and read three decks from your industry and round before you open a blank file. Pattern-match the argument, not the design.
- Write the ten answers as sentences first. No slides, no design, just ten sentences in a document. If you cannot write sentence 4, you do not have a Why now yet.
- Cut every sentence that is not one of the ten. This is where the deck gets short.
- Design last. One idea per slide, one visual, readable at phone size.
- Build the appendix from the cuts. Cohort curves, detailed financials, technical architecture, hiring plan. None of it in the main ten.
- Test the four-minute read. Hand it to someone outside your company and ask them to explain your business back to you. If they cannot, the failure is on slide 1 or 3.
- Then pick who receives it. A perfect deck sent to the wrong stage is a wasted send. Filter by stage, sector and check size in the investor database before you send anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Sequoia pitch deck template still relevant in 2026?
Yes, and Sequoia still publishes it. What changed is the detail: the current guide drops the standalone Product section, adds Vision as the closer, and reframes Market Size as Market potential. The ten questions themselves are unchanged, and the four-minute read a partner gives a deck makes the constraint more useful now, not less.
How many slides should a seed deck have in 2026?
Ten in the main deck, plus an appendix. The decks in our library that raised seed rounds sit consistently in the 10 to 15 range, including title and closing slides. Past that you are writing a memo, and a memo is a different document.
Does Sequoia publish an official pitch deck template file?
Sequoia publishes the business plan structure, not a designed template file. The ten sections are the template. Any downloadable "official Sequoia deck" is somebody's interpretation, and most of the circulating ones are copies of the pre-2015 version with a Product slide and no Vision slide.
Why does the Sequoia template I downloaded have a Product slide?
Because it is a copy of the older page. Sequoia's current guidance has no standalone Product section, and closes on Vision instead. Your product still belongs in the deck, it just lives inside Solution rather than getting its own slide.
What is the difference between the Sequoia template and the Airbnb deck?
Very little structurally. Airbnb's seed deck answers the same questions in roughly the same order. That is precisely why it is the most copied deck in startup history: it is the template executed cleanly on a real business.
Should I use the Sequoia template for a pre-seed round?
Yes, with one adjustment. At pre-seed your Financials slide is traction plus the ask, not projections. Everything else holds. Partners at pre-seed score the team and the Why now hardest, so those two deserve the extra hour.
Where can I see real pitch decks that raised money?
The Round Funded pitch deck library has 370+ decks grouped by industry, round and year, including the seed decks behind Airbnb, Uber, Coinbase and Dropbox. Reading three from your own category is the fastest way to calibrate.
Final Word
The Sequoia template survived twenty years because it is not really a template. It is the ten questions a partner is going to ask anyway, arranged so you answer them before they are asked. Use the current ten, not the version circulating as a PDF, and put everything else in the appendix.
Then send it to investors who actually fund your stage.
Find investors who fund your stage on Round Funded
Stop guessing what belongs on each slide. Read 370+ decks that raised.
