Everything you need to know about pitching you can learn from Inception

Everything you need to know about pitching you can learn from the movie Inception—the Leonardo DiCaprio movie about shared dreaming and breaking into someone else’s unconscious.

In Inception, DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, is a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for a seemingly impossible task: “inception”, the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious.” 

Just like Cobb planting an idea in Fischer’s head, your job isn’t to transfer your vision wholesale, but to design a narrative so convincing the investor feels like they dreamt it up themselves. 

A pitch deck’s job is to implant a simple, emotional, self-generated belief in the investor’s mind about your future potential. 

When it works, they’ll start pitching it back to you in the meeting. (If you’re looking to test this out with a 20+ year investor, check out my workshops.)

As Tom Hardy’s character states, “It's a very subtle art” that requires creativity.

Many founders, on the other hand, build decks that are technically correct but uninspiring: bullet points, TAM numbers, and product screenshots. They ask their network for templates and try to copy “The Pitch Deck that Got Plaid Its Seed Round” from LinkedIn.

Never mind that Plaid raised a seed round in 2013 at a time before…well…Plaid.

Your story has to be built for this moment, and for this investor—because their defenses are trained to say no.

For it to grow naturally in their mind, like a seed, the idea needs to be simple, uncomplicated. If it takes 20 pages of a deck for someone to be convinced, it will feel like something unwieldy is being pushed on them. It will meet with mental resistance. 

The right seed makes them light up from the very first description. It will generate emotion. The rest of the information just cements its place in the investor’s mind to make sure it sticks. 

Julian Shapiro, a prolific writer, founder, and startup investor has a guide to writing good non-fiction. Consider it a cheat sheet for planting ideas:

“A novel idea is one that's not just new to the reader, but also significant and not easily intuited. Think of it as new and worthwhile. I've identified five categories:

• Counter-intuitive — "Oh, I never realized the world worked that way."

• Counter-narrative — "Wow, that's not how I was told the world worked!"

• Shock and awe — "That's crazy. I would have never believed it."

• Elegant articulations — "Beautiful. I couldn't have said it better myself."

• Make someone feel seen — "Yes! That's exactly how I feel!"

Novelty is what gives readers dopamine hits. You find novel ideas by pursuing your curiosity and noting what interests and surprises you along the way. If it intrigues you, it'll likely intrigue your readers too.”

This is a super helpful way to think about this seed and its initial “hook”.

Start with two out of three “must haves” for a great startup story category: team, market and traction. At the early stage, you rarely have all three so you’re really relying on combinations of two to impress an investor:

• Team + Market

• Market + Traction

• Team + Traction. 

What can you say about those two big checkmarks that will generate a dopamine hit? 

Will someone be *excited* to meet and speak with your team?

Are they *stunned* at the size of a big market they didn’t realize existed?

Will they be in *utter disbelief* about how fast you are moving?

(If these all feel like a stretch, you have to go back to the drawing board and figure out the barriers to these things being big yeses.)

The other reason why your hook needs to both create excitement and be simple is because of how VC firms work internally. Whoever you pitch to is going to have to create internal momentum if you’re ever going to get a check.

On Monday morning, they’re going to meet as a group and tell each other what they’ve seen in the past week. It’s a blur of ideas seeking early team support. Without it, an investor is going to feel like they’re pushing a rock up a hill.

Here’s what it must accomplish to survive the whole team’s subconscious defenses:

1. It has to be idiot-proof.

They’re going to botch your pitch in the worst way, because you’re not the one delivering it. You don’t want it to devolve into, “I met a guy, doing this thing… I dunno, it’s like… they put a chip in a cow, and then, there’s some data, and somehow, investors participate… I dunno.”

That’s not going to win anyone over.

2. It can’t be easily dismissed. 

One partner saying, “That’s never going to work for X reason,” is enough to kill all the momentum on a deal.

3. It has to feel big. 

Everyone’s looking for the next big fund returner and unless you find a way to convince people that your Pog trading site will unlock an eBay killer, no one’s going to get psyched. 

This last part—the bigness—needs to be pervasive. Every single page in your deck needs to support the argument that they’re going to make a *ton* of money on this. Too many slides in a row that don’t—especially upfront, and you’ve lost their attention. 

In fact, any individual page in a deck is easily forgotten. That’s why it’s got to flow as a cohesive story—not just a series of slides that fit a structure you saw online somewhere. Stories are memory hacks. Just like retracing your steps in a dream to remember how you got to a strange café, a narrative helps investors recall the facts.

The last key aspect of a pitch—something I’ve probably repeated to founders more than any other piece of advice—is that investors aren’t rewarding you for the past by investing. At least 80% of your pitch story should be about what’s next, not what you’ve done previously. 

This isn’t a scrapbook of what you’ve done. It’s a trailer for the blockbuster that hasn’t been made yet. If investors can picture themselves in the credits, they’ll fight to buy a ticket.