The Team Slide: Why Eleven C-Suites Sinks You

You can go on LinkedIn right now and find a company with four employees and six people whose title starts with "Chief."

Chief Growth Officer. Chief Culture Officer. Chief Vision Officer, at a company that has not yet shipped a product.

This is not a scandal. It is just a thing that happens. Titles are free, and it feels good to hand one out, especially to yourself.

But titles are also a signal, and signals get read. A company with a two-person team and five C-suite titles is not telling you it's organized. It's telling you it's worried it doesn't look organized, and it's overcorrecting.

Investors read team slides the same way. They are not counting your resume bullet points. They are counting your gaps.

If you're missing a technical cofounder, they will notice whether you mention it or not — the only choice you have is whether you look like you know it, or like you're hoping nobody asks. If you have someone in a role because they were the only person around, and their background has nothing to do with what the company needs, leaving them off the slide is not dishonest. It's editing. Nobody needs the full org chart. They need the two or three people who explain why this specific team can pull this specific thing off, and an honest word about who's not there yet.

Same goes for advisors. An advisor's name carries weight if they've put money in, or if they fill a hole that would otherwise be glaring — the cybersecurity advisor who used to work for Homeland Security, say. Otherwise their name on your slide is just more furniture.

The instinct to add more — more titles, more names, more credentials — comes from the same place as the four-person company with six chiefs. It feels like armor. It reads like anxiety.

One slide. Thirty seconds. The people who matter, and the honesty to say who's missing.

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More on this in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.