Square’s pitch deck is a clear and compelling story to investors. They start with a clear description of Square’s value proposition. It immediately starts by highlighting the attractive parts of Square: the solution they propose, the strength of the founding team, the size of the market opportunity for Square and a simple, boiled-down explanation of the Square product/service. This orients investors immediately, setting the pitch apart by capturing their attention and getting them on board so that all further information affirms what they’ve already heard.
This slide is great as it shows a clear story of continuous, rapid market growth. Positioning the bar graph centrally and large is extremely effective in clearly communicating the trend that they are seeing in the dollar amount of mobile payments in the U.S. in billions. They also provided a subtitle for the slide, “Mobile payments is a massive, rapidly growing but underpenetrated industry”, to distil the insights from this slide into one line. Under the graph, the breakdown of the opportunity, market changes and how Square is positioned to capitalise on this market is clear, with the points about Square itself highlighted in green.
The third slide I will highlight is the exit strategy slide: investors are there to make money and ultimately get that money back at some point (or at least know that they can). Ending the pitch by clearly explaining the plethora of lucrative exit options for Square is something that investors value, sealing the deal by convincing them both of Square’s potential as a business and a great investment opportunity.
I would have asked how many customers they had on Square at the time (this wasn’t clear in the deck). I will steal the present the solution first and explain after for our pitch.
