Decks get edited. Again. And again. Until the science is vague, the font is sacred, and no one remembers what the original idea was. That’s the grind behind fundraising in biotech. You are selling potential, not results. But the pressure to sound like a sure thing creeps in fast.

Suddenly you are rewriting the same slide to sound bold but safe. Clear but visionary. Unique but not too weird. It is a slow erosion of honesty, dressed up as polish.

And if you start caring too much about the font, it is probably because everything else keeps changing.

Why It Feels Like a Loop

Founders ask, “How many pitches until we land someone?”
The answer is always the same: as many as it takes to make the story sound just risky enough to be exciting, and just solid enough to feel like a bet worth taking.

It is not lying. It is not manipulation. It is the art of getting someone else to see what you already believe, without showing so much that they start doubting it.

What You Can Actually Do

The best founders do not just pitch. They listen. They notice which parts of the story spark questions. They test one version of the deck against another and look for shifts in response, not just outcome. They find one thing in the pitch that never changes, and they use it as an anchor while the rest evolves. Most importantly, they keep coming back to the core problem they solve. That is what keeps the story grounded when everything else gets messy.

In early-stage life sciences, no pitch is final. Every version is a snapshot of where the story stands. The real progress is not in the deck. It is in how clearly you can frame your future without losing its tension.

If your only constant is the font, you are not failing. You are fundraising.