If you’re a first-time founder staring at a blank pitch deck, the fastest way to make yours better is to study one that’s actually won!
GŌRU Founder and Author, Peter Deans spent this year as a Mentor and Judge for the Hult Prize, working with a cohort of student founders building real startups against real deadlines. One of them, HERO, just made the Top 20 worldwide and is heading to London.
This is a breakdown of why their idea and their deck worked, with their actual slides down the page to give you inspo for your next deck.
What is the Hult Prize?
The Hult Prize is one of the biggest student startup competitions on the planet. Student teams from over 130 countries build for-profit startups that tackle at least one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The winning team walks away with $1 million USD in seed funding.
This cycle drew around 18,000 registered startups. Roughly 2,000 made Nationals. The Global Finals happen at Ashridge House near London, where the last eight teams pitch live for the million.
Here’s how they did it…
Problem: make me feel it in one line
HERO opens on the biggest problem they could credibly own. Heart attacks are the leading cause of death worldwide, killing over 20 million people a year. Then they land the mechanism with one emotive line: when oxygen stops, life stops.
Statistics validate your argument, but the weight of the problem has to land with emotion. Simple, undeniable. Notice there’s no slabs of text on screen either, so the room stays with the speaker instead of reading ahead or getting distracted from the main point.
Ask yourself: can a stranger repeat your problem back after one slide? HERO’s, you can.
Solution: what it is, why it’s better
HERO is a hyperbaric oxygenation device that fits over a patient’s head and delivers concentrated oxygen at higher pressure, getting up to 50% more oxygen into the blood in the critical first minutes of a heart attack. It’s portable, so it works in an ambulance, not just a hospital.
Notice the sequence. What it is, then why it’s better, then the proof: hyperbaric oxygen has been shown to halve mortality in heart attack patients.
That order matters. Founders love to lead with how clever their technology is.
Audiences want to know what it does for the person with the problem first. HERO earns the technical detail by anchoring it to a life saved.
The name does work too. HERO stands for Hyperbaric Emergency Rescue Oxygen. It tells you what it does and it sticks. Your solution should be that easy to hold in your head; you might be familiar with it, but your audience isn’t.
Traction: proof you’re already moving
This is the slide that separates an idea from a startup.
HERO doesn’t just claim it will work. They show a timeline of things already done: grants and awards, a functioning prototype, a patent pending, then physician interviews and Letters of Intent. Over 25 physicians have voiced interest. Their most recent LOI, from the Chief Medical Officer of their largest target health system, is worth $3 million.
For your own deck, traction is anything that proves momentum. Prototypes, pilots, pre-orders, signed letters, awards, waitlist numbers. You almost certainly have more than you think.
Team: why you, and why now
Investors back people as much as products, and early on, your team slide carries more weight than almost anything else.
HERO’s team is as impressive as their product; a neurosurgery resident as COO, product designer CCO and med-tech founder CEO. Paired with a bench of advisors with cardiothoracic surgery, clinical innovation and global business experience behind them.
Including job titles might feel like window dressing, but together, they present as an aligned cohort of knowledge. Frame each member with a unique skillset that can assist the wider team through problems and people will trust you to deliver.
The closer: make them feel the cost of waiting
HERO’s pitch is two minutes long. Their closing slide points out that in those same two minutes, HERO could have saved 10 lives.
Turning the format itself into the argument makes the problem urgent and personal in a single beat, and it’s the line everyone remembers walking out.
You don’t need a life-or-death product to do this. You need a closing line that makes the cost of doing nothing feel real. Raise the stakes and leave a lasting impression.
What you can steal from HERO’s deck
- One problem, one number, one sentence. Make it repeatable and emotive.
- Solution in order: what it is, why it’s better, then the proof.
- Traction on a timeline. Show the line moving.
- A team slide that answers “why you,” not “look at us.”
- A closer built on the cost of waiting, not a polite sign-off.
Winning decks solve problems. They take logic and emotion and make their solution the clear answer. HERO did that in two minutes, and it’s why they’re going to London.
Where this sits in the startup journey
Pitching is the last step of a much longer build. Before you can tell this story well, you need the pieces underneath it: a validated problem, a business model, and numbers that hold up. That’s the entire back half of the Startup Toolkit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Founders, written by our founder Peter Deans.
If you want to understand the numbers a judge or investor will actually probe, start with how to value a startup and validating your idea before you build.
And if you’re a student with a bold idea and some friends, you can enter the Hult Prize yourself. Everything you need is at hultprize.org.
Want the tools to build a fundable startup, not just a good-looking deck? The Startup Bundle includes the Startup Toolkit book plus the Business Plan, Pitch Deck and Cash Flow Forecast templates. Everything you need to turn a winning idea into a winning pitch.
