From Facebook To LinkedIn, A Look At The Original Pitches Of Billion-Dollar Companies

Everyone starts small so did the now billion-dollar unicorn companies. Airbnb used to be AirBed&Breakfast while BuzzFeed was just doing 2.5 million monthly page views when it registered, and now they are valued over billions. This journey included nailing a pitch to the early investors. Here are the early pitch decks used by these unicorns.

1. Airbnb

In its early pitch deck, Airbnb named Couchsurfing, Craigslist, Hostels.com, and Hotels.com as its competitors. It was valued at $40.6 billion at the time of its IPO, and at the end of the first day of its trading, its valuation catapulted to $86.5 billion. Here’s the early pitch deck Airbnb used.

2. BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed’s early pitch deck of 2008 cited their monthly page views as 2.5 million. By 2020, the number shot up to 1.2 billion unique page views across its websites. In 2021, BuzzFeed went public via the SPAC merger and was valued at $1.7 billion. Here’s the pitch deck BuzzFeed used in 2008.

3. Canva

In its early days, Canva was named Fusion Books, which was a yearbook design business. Canva’s co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins presented the following deck to convince the investors. Canva’s current valuation is $40 billion.

4. Coinbase

Coinbase presented the following pitch in 2012 for its seed round. At that time, the price of bitcoin was around $6.25, and Coinbase highlighted the rising popularity through their deck. Coinbase’s valuation at the time of IPO was $65.3 billion.

5. Dropbox

Dropbox’s early pitch deck was shared by Sequoia Capital. This pitch deck helped them raise $1.2 million in the seed round in 2007. Dropbox went public in March 2018 at a valuation above $12 billion.

6. Facebook

Facebook back in 2005 looked completely different than what it looks like today. Initially, it was known as thefacebook.com when it received its first investment. At the time of its IPO, Facebook was valued at $104 billion. This was the early pitch deck used by Facebook.

7. LinkedIn

Here’s the pitch deck used by LinkedIn billing it as the “professional people search 2.0.” LinkedIn hadn’t generated any revenue till then. In 5 years, it raised $103 million before it went public in 2011.

8. MySQL

MySQL’s former CEO shared the following deck from 2003 when they went for Series B funding. This is a highly detailed deck with 186 slides. MySQL raised $38 million before it was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008. It’s valuation at the time of later acquisition was $1 billion.

9. Tinder

Back in 2012, Tinder was launched as Matchbox. It still has a lot of features that were mentioned in its initial pitch deck, like hyper-location, mutual liking, common friends and interests, etc.

10. Uber

Uber’s co-founder Garrett Camp shared the company’s first pitch deck from 2008. Uber estimated its market to be around $4.2 billion annually and growing. Its valuation at the time of IPO was $75 billion.

11. YouTube

In its initial pitch deck, YouTube counted under 10,000 users and 100,000 video views per day with rapid growth. Now, YouTube has over 2 billion monthly users and over 1 billion hours of video watched per day. Here’s the initial pitch deck presented by YouTube.