The team slide: why you, not just who you are

The team slide is where founders either underclaim or overclaim. Underclaim: three photos with a job title under each and no story. Overclaim: a wall of logos from previous employers as if working at a well-known company transfers to running one.

The question the slide is answering is not "is this team credentialed." It is "why is this team the one that finally does this thing." That question is answered with founder-market fit, not with logos.

Founder-market fit in one line each

For each founder, write one sentence that connects a specific prior experience to the specific reason it makes them right for this specific problem. Not a career summary. A causal link.

What counts as an unfair advantage

• You have shipped this thing before, at scale, and can point to the outcome.
• You lived the problem as the customer for years and can prove it.
• You have a proprietary channel, dataset, or relationship a competitor cannot buy.
• You have technical depth in a domain where the depth actually matters (not "we know Kubernetes").

Logos are not an unfair advantage. "We worked at Google" is true for 200,000 people. "We built the ranking system for Google Shopping" is unfair. Be specific about what you did, not where you did it.

How many people belong on the slide

For a seed deck, the slide should show founders and, at most, one or two early hires whose backgrounds materially change the story (a technical co-founder, a domain expert). For an A, add the leadership hires you have already made and the one hire the round will fund.

The one-sentence team headline

The strongest team slides open with a sentence, above the photos, that summarizes why the team is right for the problem. Read it in isolation and it should be a small argument.

Between us we have hired 900 restaurant workers, shipped payroll to 40K SMBs, and lived the scheduling problem from both sides of the counter.

· Team headline, Nimbus Payroll deck