Cloudera Pitch Deck Series-A Stage Startup

Here’s the deck Cloudera pitch deck used to raise their $5m series-A in 2008. They IPOd in 2017 for $1.9bn.

The deck is pretty ugly, but their function is decent! They explain some complicated tech fairly simply. There is great use of informative images (I like the use of Google Trends). My guess is that this isn’t the full deck and Accel have deleted some slides.

About Cloudera

Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop company, develops and distributes Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the world’s largest and most popular web sites.

Founded by leading experts on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo, Cloudera’s mission is to bring the power of Hadoop, MapReduce, and distributed storage to companies of all sizes in the enterprise, Internet and government sectors.

Fundraises to date

Pitch deck review summary

This is the epitome of a tech deck. I have never seen a more nerdy deck. For the few nerds that look at this and understand it like water, great, but for normal people it’s painful. If you know who you are specifically pitching then you can do this (don’t be as ugly as this), and by this turn incomprehensible to 11.

Tbh, the only reason I have this deck here is that it was hard to find and some nerds will like to look at it for historical reasons.

Structured summary review

Words

When they have an opportunity to write words, oh boy do they take the opportunity!

The content is good (I think, didn’t read anything as it would take too much effort to even pretend I get it).

Slide length

This is a selection of slides. Gosh knows how many tedious slides they put out. I perish to think.

Headers

Don’t write headers like you are leaving notes on what you want to talk about. Explain the point of the slide.

Appearance

Never insert a background like this. Just leave it white, or some high contrast color. The background does so much damage it is not funny.

Don’t paste in images. Reformat natively.

Narrative

Ergh, there isn’t one. It’s a series of nerd slides (No offense, I wish I understood it all).

Structure

Don’t use 6:9 slide structure. This was the norm back then- it is now.

Don’t bother putting confidential in the footer. No one cares.

Put the source in the footer with size 8 font (small, but just legible).

Slides

You have to be a nerd to understand the slides. Make sure that the audience is up to the task.

Cloudera Pitch Deck

Don’t put the date on the slide. It tells investors how long you have been raising.

Start with explaining what it is you do. This deck is heavy… so it would be useful.

Ok, they have an insight on Moor’s law. Nerds.

What about uniprocessor performance? Tell me the point.

Why is there a book on the page? Bizarre.

The nerds are stuffing in three random VIX and RISK stats. This is terrible slide structuring.

The deck is hard to follow.

Apparently they’re said so much that it is time for the team? Why not just start with the team?

Put images of the team on the slide.

The content per person is fine, but the formatting makes it feel like too much.

You should start with this slide. But man, you have to be a nerd to understand it all. Maybe an uber nerd gets this, I’m a mere mortal.

Gosh I hate the contrast on the slides.

Content is decent and follows on from the what is Hadoop thing.

This is like a F-you, yeah, people use Hadoop.

Feels like the founders are great on the tech and less on the commercial.

Super annoying. There is a slide. The header says momentum. Now go read the trends and figure out what the point is, and btw, there are two points at the bottom which you wouldn’t notice are linked to the day date?