Building a Pitch Deck in LaTeX That Does Not Look Like Beamer

What makes a LaTeX deck look like a LaTeX deck is not LaTeX. It is four pieces of theme furniture: the navigation bar, the shaded title block, the footer strip, and the 4:3 page. Remove those and the same engine produces slides indistinguishable from anything made in a modern tool, with the advantage that your deck is plain text you can diff.

The preamble that removes the tells

Most of the work is subtraction. This is the whole of it:

\documentclass[aspectratio=169,11pt]{beamer}

% 1. No furniture. This one line removes the navigation bar,
%    the headline, and the footline in one go.
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\beamertemplatenavigationsymbolsempty
\setbeamertemplate{headline}{}
\setbeamertemplate{footline}{}

% 2. One accent, everything else near-black on white.
\definecolor{accent}{HTML}{2A5CAA}
\setbeamercolor{structure}{fg=accent}
\setbeamercolor{normal text}{fg=black!85}

% 3. Frame titles as plain text, left aligned, with room to breathe.
\setbeamertemplate{frametitle}{%
  \vspace{1.2em}\hspace{0.5em}%
  \usebeamerfont{frametitle}\insertframetitle\par\vspace{0.4em}}
\setbeamerfont{frametitle}{size=\Large,series=\bfseries}

That is the entire difference between a deck that reads as 2009 and one that does not. No package, no custom class, nothing to install.

The structure that gets read

Ten to twelve slides, in this order, because it answers questions in the order they get asked:

1. The one-liner. What it is, for whom, in a sentence a stranger repeats correctly.
2. The problem, with a number. Not a story about a persona.
3. The product, shown. A screenshot beats a description.
4. Why now. What changed that makes this possible or necessary this year.
5. Traction. Real figures with dates on them.
6. How it makes money. Price, unit, and who pays.
7. The market, honestly sized. Bottom-up beats a slice of a trillion.
8. Competition, named. Naming nobody reads as not having looked.
9. The team. Why these people.
10. The ask. Amount, runway, what it buys.

A deck that lands on the ask at slide six with no traction slide is a deck that will be asked about traction. The order is not aesthetic.

One number, one slide

The most common failure in a LaTeX deck is treating a slide like a page. Bullets nest, a table arrives with nine rows, and the room starts reading instead of listening. If a slide has a number that matters, set it large and put the caveat underneath in small type. If it has three numbers, it is three slides or it is a handout.

Drafting it without doing the layout

The structure above is a checklist, which makes it the kind of thing worth handing to an assistant. These asks produce slides rather than advice about slides:

+ \documentclass[aspectratio=169,11pt]{beamer}
+ \setbeamertemplate{footline}{}
+ \begin{frame}{The ask}

Or start from one that is already built

The presentation templates include decks built this way, and there is a roundup of the Beamer themes if you want to see what the defaults look like before deciding to remove them. For a talk rather than a raise, the conference talk guide covers a different structure for a different room.