Those early decks are some of the most useful material a founder can study. They weren't polished by a brand team. They show what a young company chose to say when it had little more than a problem, a plan and some early proof.

That's why we put together a collection of pitch decks from 26 companies that became unicorns, plus a rare document from the other side of the table: Sequoia's investment memo on DoorDash. This article covers what's inside, what these companies became, the lessons that repeat, and how to use the collection on your own deck.

The 26 companies cover almost every major category of the last two decades of venture capital:

Most are fundraising decks, many from the company's earliest rounds. A few were built for a different reader, and that's useful too. Snapchat's deck was made for advertisers. Tesla's and Shopify's are investor presentations from companies that were already scaling. DoorDash is represented by the memo Sequoia wrote before investing, which shows how an investor argues for a deal internally.

The collection also spans time. The oldest companies, like LinkedIn, Tesla and Facebook, were founded in the early 2000s. The youngest, Perplexity, was founded in 2022.

In the rest of this article you'll see what these companies became, from $1B exits to valuations above $100B, why reaching unicorn status didn't guarantee a happy ending, five lessons that repeat across the collection, how to read an investor memo, and a five-step method to apply all of it to your own deck. The full collection is attached as a file.