You have probably sent a pitch deck you were proud of and watched it disappear into an investor’s inbox. Investors now spend less than three minutes on a typical deck, which leaves little room for a story that takes ten slides to make sense. GTMDialogues brought Sanjay Kanvinde, Co-founder and General Partner at Lavni Ventures, into an unfiltered AMA hosted by Saurabh Lahoti to talk about what actually earns a founder the next meeting.

Sanjay had a full corporate career at SLB (formerly Schlumberger), working across R&D, business development and operations and managing teams spread over 80 countries. Today he mentors deep-tech founders at Venture Center in Pune and invests in climate and medtech companies. Lavni’s first fund is fully deployed and has started exiting, and its second fund is already oversubscribed.

Three things a great pitch does that most founder decks miss

This piece pulls together his sharpest answers on pitching, judging founders, and the ask slide most founders get wrong.

Sanjay teaches a full course on pitching, but he boiled it down to three things every great pitch does before the call ends:

1. It tells a compelling story.

The pitch is built to be understood, not just to communicate. Early-stage decks often pack in information but never check what the listener took away. The real test is whether your story can be repeated. The partner you pitch has to walk into the next team meeting and explain in two lines what you’re building and why the fund should meet you again. Sanjay has seen this one change take a founder’s chances of getting funded from about 20% to 90%.

2. It gets the investor past their conviction threshold. 

Most deep-tech founders try to win the room with data alone. At an early stage, neither you nor the investor has all the answers, so emotion and intuition have to close the gap between the evidence you have and the conviction they need to say yes.

3. It ends with a clear call to action. 

Sanjay tells his mentees never to close with a “Thank you” slide, because it moves the conversation away from what happens next. Stay on the ask slide and push for the follow-up call.

Consistency holds all three together. If slide two says one thing and slide eight says another, the investor has to work out which one to believe, and most won’t bother. Give enough detail for the moment and hold the rest until they ask.

Why Sanjay looks at your startup and founders as two separate bets

Before the founder even comes into it, the opportunity has to fit the fund. Sanjay receives a steady stream of decks that fall outside Lavni’s thesis, and he wishes those founders had spent five minutes on the website first. His own filters are specific: technology that can scale globally from India, a business model that can become profitable, and measurable impact on the bottom four billion people in the world.

On the founder's side, what he looks for depends on the stage. For a company two years from revenue, he wants self-awareness about strengths and weaknesses, openness to feedback, and resourcefulness in attracting employees, customers and investors. For a company past 100 crore in revenue, the questions shift to whether the founder delivered on the plan, built momentum, and built a team and culture that performs.

At the earliest stage, the founder carries 30 to 40% of the decision. Sanjay and his partners run four or five deep conversations on topics like GTM and team, and they watch how the founder engages, not just what they say. He says the partners agree with each other about 90% of the time, because so many signals come through in the conversation itself. When they form a view, they test it. They may ask you to come back next week with specific information, just to see how you handle it.

Why Sanjay backs founders with skill gaps but walks away from character gaps

Saurabh asked which gaps Sanjay is willing to work through and which ones are non-negotiable. His answer split cleanly into two buckets.

Financial literacy, communication, sales management, team building and culture can all be learned within a year with the right support. He has told founders that their understanding of a P&L sits at two out of ten, then worked with them to reach seven or eight over six months. In about 80% of cases, founders enjoy this. They step out of the lab and grow fast.

The second bucket is character: being fair and generous with your team, staying positive under pressure, and knowing your own limits. These change slowly, if at all. Occasionally a CEO turns out to be a CTO at heart and, after three years, shows no drive to learn what the CEO role demands. That leads to a hard board-level conversation, and Sanjay would rather spot it early.

Sanjay’s five-point checklist for an ask slide that pushes your valuation up

Sanjay spends more time on the ask slide than on almost anything else. For an early-stage deep-tech company, investors usually already have a valuation range in mind. Your preparation decides where in that range you land. The slide needs to answer:

1. How much you’re raising. Build the number from your cash flow model, because investors will test every assumption in it. Add a margin of safety: if you need two crore, raise two and a half, since product delays of a few months are common.
2. How long the runway lasts. Aim for 18 to 24 months. Out of 40 investor conversations, only four or five may move forward, so you don’t want to repeat that cycle every year.
3. What you’ll achieve with it. Name the milestones the money buys, such as a validated pilot or a revenue target. Keep them ambitious but realistic: Sanjay is happy with a founder who targets ten and reaches six, not one who promises 20 with no plan behind it.
4. How the capital flows across rounds. Show how many rounds it will take to reach 10 or 20 crore in revenue. Each round should remove a specific risk, so you raise the next one at a higher valuation.
5. What an exit could look like. Investors need to return capital within five to ten years. Show them a realistic path, such as an acquisition or a public listing.

He shared one example of a founder he coached who had customers who loved the product but had nothing in writing. Sanjay asked him to collect letters of intent. The founder came back with commitments worth two crore on customer letterheads, and that one proof point moved him to the top of the valuation range.

Why AI-generated decks and financial models are costing founders their second meeting

Picture the night before a pitch. You’ve asked AI to clean up your slides and build out the financial model, and everything finally looks investor-ready. The next day, a partner asks how you got to your cost per unit, and you realize you aren’t sure.

That moment is becoming common. Sanjay uses AI every day, but this month alone he has met several founders who couldn’t explain what was written on their own slides. The AI-generated financial models were worse. When an investor asks five follow-up questions and you can answer only one, the polish stops helping and starts working against you.

His fix is simple: test your numbers in real life. If your model assumes one worker packs 200 packages a day, go and pack them yourself. One founder tried and managed 40, and his whole cost model changed. “These decks don’t smell of sweat, tears and blood of the founder,” Sanjay says. “They are too hygienic and too generic.”

Saurabh added that fundraising is high-stakes selling, and you have to own every word in the deck. Use AI where it saves you time, such as an animation that shows how your product works, but don’t hand it the thinking.

Across every answer, Sanjay kept coming back to the same idea: investors aren’t buying the deck, they’re buying the founder who can defend it. Before your next pitch, make sure you can explain every slide and every number without looking at the screen.