Thirteen years in the room

I didn't set out to build pitch decks. Thirteen years ago, in India, "pitch deck" wasn't a profession. It was barely even a phrase. Founders had ideas, half built spreadsheets and a lot of conviction, but no one whose whole job was to turn those into something an investor could believe in ninety seconds. I started Plan My Venture to be that bridge: a firm built only for pitch decks and financial models.

What began as a service quietly turned into an education. One deck became ten, ten became a few hundred and somewhere past two thousand founders across nearly every sector I can name, a pattern showed up that I couldn't unsee.

The room teaches what no spreadsheet can

I watched founders raise and I watched founders freeze. The unsettling part was how often the same quality of idea would win one room and lose the next. The variable was rarely the business. It was how the founder held the room. The order they revealed things in. The silence they were willing to sit in. The one slide they let an investor's eye land on first.

After enough rooms, those moments stop feeling like luck and start to look like rules. The three seconds a slide really gets. The ninety second window before attention is gone. The difference between a title that labels a slide and one that wins the argument. I started teaching it to the founders I worked with, then writing it down, because it felt wrong to keep something that useful locked in my own head.

From a service to a system

Plan My Venture grew into something bigger than a deck studio. It became IGHC Limited, a home for a few bets that all circle the same question: how do you get a founder ready for the room before it matters? My years at IIM Calcutta sharpened the thinking. The years in the field gave it teeth.

But I kept hitting the same ceiling. Everything I knew lived inside a conversation. Me, across a table, reading a founder and telling them the truth. That doesn't scale. I can only sit in so many rooms. And the founders who need that honesty most are usually the ones who can least get access to it.

So I tried to put the room into something they could practise with

That's why we built a pitch simulator, now part of pitching.vc Academy. It lets a founder rehearse the pitch out loud, in their own voice, and hear how they actually sound under pressure. Practise the hard questions. Fix the wobble before the meeting that counts, not after it. The aim is simple and a little ambitious: make real pitch practice available to any founder, anywhere, the night before it matters.

And everything I've learned in those rooms is going into a book, Before You Pitch, written with Chandni Niranjan. It's the guide I wish someone had handed the founders I met thirteen years ago.

If the room taught me one thing, it's this. Investors don't fund the idea. They fund the founder who can make them believe it in the time it takes to glance at a slide.

I'm still happiest in that room, sitting across from a founder who's about to ask for money. This site is where I write down what I see there, so the next founder walks in a little less alone than I did.

The journey, at a glance