Why do they call a slide deck a “slide deck”? Where did it originate from?

Where does the term pitch deck come from?

To answer that question we need to back in time to when everything sucked (basically when I was a kid).

Why do they call a slide deck a “slide deck”.

It’s pretty ghetto.

Remember slide projectors?

No, I mean really ghetto…

This kind of ghetto. Acetate slides

Those are slides before PowerPoint existed.

When I was a kid in school we had these contraptions which involved turning off the lights and looking at a set of ‘slides’ that the teacher had prepared. Or they would be fancy and not use a white/blackboard and write on slides with a non-permanent marker.

“Deck” refers to a “deck of cards”.

Before HTML was invented in the 80s, Apple had a hypertext product that used “decks” of “hypercards”. Each “hypercard” was analogous to a webpage, and each “deck” was analogous to a website.

You had acetate slides one would pace on a projector. Each slide was mutually exclusive.

A pitch slide is analogous to a card in a deck of cards.

You could mix and match the slides as you wanted.

The metaphor implies that the cards can be sorted at will, and some cards can be left out of the pitch.

A pitch deck originates from these slides, well the second part does. Someone just changed slide to pitch… because like, you’re pitching, duh ;).

Let’s face it, pitch deck is way more catchy than pitch presentation…

If you want to see all the public pitch decks on the internet, head here.

If you need help writing your pitch deck, head to Perfect Pitch Deck.