Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gitgud 2221 days ago
It's the funny that Facebook were pitching advertising to investors in 2004, and they didn't have any ads until 2007.

It's also interesting that there's no information on sources or anything to explain these pitch decks. I'm pretty sure the original would not start with "Facebook's original pitch deck", so how much each pitch has been altered?

Also survivor-ship bias... these are all highly sucessful companies with amazing products. It would also be great to see how failed businesses still got funding, e.g; "Juicero" or "Theranos"...

https://starthouse.xyz/facebook

https://about.fb.com/news/2007/11/facebook-unveils-facebook-...

4 comments

I don’t think that Facebook deck is real. It isn’t actually asking for an investment, but instead soliciting advertisers. The section on targeting seems way too evolved for where Facebook was in April, 2004 and if you search for the text from the slide, you only get hits on “sample pitch deck” sites: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22allows+for+targeted+adver...
It's even funnier that the pitch deck is supposed to be from 2004 but has a photo of Eduardo Saverin in it, taken 2011 [0].

[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/29/tech/social-media/faceboo...

Successful startups dont really need that good pitch decks or pitching in general, because the metrics speak for themselves. Would be certainly more interesting to see Juicero pitch deck.
For Theranos I guess it was roughly:

1) list of big names advising or on board of directors acquired through connections

2) total adressable market of blood tests

3) current cost and complexity - need full vial for each single test

4) promise of lower cost and complexity - just one drop of blood

5) at some point down the time line they likely have added DoD contract and Walgreens partnership

6)Pre-orders (Governments in West Africa for Ebola, US military for Medvacs and Safeway)
Thanks for bringing this up. I've taken the FB deck down. It was a mistake for me not to properly vet each of them before uploading them and it does look pretty dubious.