Andreessen Horowitz: how to pitch without talking about your company
a16z pitch cheat code
Your startup is rarely the most interesting story.
The interesting story is the shift in the world that makes your startup necessary.
That is the “cheat code” Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are pointing to: the story of you and your company is not inherently interesting, but there is almost certainly a much bigger story that involves your company. The founder’s job is to find that story, explain it better than anyone else, and make the company feel like an inevitable consequence of it.
Alex Karp and Palantir are one of the clearest examples.
In this issue we include:
How Alex Karp and Ryan Peterson do it
The 6 part pitch framework + 1 minute pitch template
3 examples (freight software, ai customer support and ai finance ops)
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Here’s a good place to start:
🤖 AI Agent Templates
↳ The McKinsey Slide Playbook for Claude — how to build consulting-grade presentations in minutes.
📈 Startup Playbooks
↳ The AI Founders Playbook — lessons from Sequoia, OpenAI, Nvidia, and LangChain on building AI startups from zero.
🎯 The Deck Library
↳ 27 Most Promising AI Startup Pitch Decks Backed by Top Investors — the best-funded AI startups of 2025, slide by slide.
💰 Investor Database & Tools
↳ The Family Office List — 1,000 family offices actively writing cheques. Used by 5,000+ founders raising their round.
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