Your audience has mental models of businesses in their head. For example, if you are raising money for your own new venture capital fund, people expect to see that you only invest in companies with a clear competitive advantage, great management teams with track record, that you as an investor are hands on, that your investment team is great and that the carry is 20%. All venture capital pitch decks sound like that.

If your approach to the business is different than the mental model, you need to explain it carefully upfront, explain the pure mechanics of the situation, before launching into the more emotional part of the presentation (showing how great your team is, and how great the investment opportunity is).

Your different model might be completely obvious to you, it is unlikely to be the case with an audience who hears it for the first time. I you wait for it in the back of the presentation, your audience all of a sudden will be confused (“Wait a minute?”) and the questions/discussions you are going to get in the end are practical ones, not about the great investment opportunity, but how exactly your fund works.

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