When to skip the decorations

Startup people love to trot out the original Airbnb pitch deck (easy to Google) but my new favorite is from Mistral.ai, sort of like Europe’s answer to OpenAI. Aside from data sovereignty for EU firms, they want to innovate on the LaaM,  language model as a service. For example, AI sustainability innovation could come through small lean models that run on your normal laptop and have utility as assistants. There are more interesting details, too. But why am I telling you all this? Because this “deck” is an impressive example of strategic messaging. It’s really just a word doc, too, and it has no graphics, design, infographics, or charts. If it “cheats” (ie. uses something other than rhetorical skill to persuade) in any way, it’s by mentioning the list of wealthy and successful co-founders, such a ex-Meta/Llama types. But you sort of have to do that to make an investment pitch deck work. It’s also got a: good story villain big idea that’s inspiring set of entangled supporting ideas long-term plan for a position of advantage In other words, it’s pure strategy. And without a single hero image. In fact, nor is there a prototype behind it or even a line of code. Yet just yesterday Mistral raised over 100 million, based on that text. They really do need that money to lock in AI compute infrastructure too. Will it work? No idea. But here’s the takeaway: if the strategy and messaging is on point, sometimes it’s better to skip the decoration.