A side-by-side reading of three investor presentations published in February 2025 — Marti, LegalZoom and Shopify — and what a founder can take from each.

Within a few weeks of each other in February 2025, three public companies published investor presentations. Marti, a Turkish mobility app listed on NYSE American, reported $16.6 million in revenue for 2024. LegalZoom reported $682 million. Shopify reported $8.9 billion.

None of the three is a seed pitch deck, and that is exactly why they are worth reading. A pitch deck is a promise. An investor presentation is a promise that has already been tested, filed with the SEC and footnoted. Read one on its own and you learn how that company talks. Read all three side by side and you see something no single deck shows you: which part of the argument carries the weight at each stage of a company's life.

Early on, the gap carries it. In the middle, discipline does. At scale, the machine does. Everything else in these decks is secondary to that shift.

Marti runs car, motorcycle and taxi hailing plus a two-wheeled electric fleet in Türkiye. In 2024 it guided to $16.6 million in revenue and negative $22.5 million in adjusted EBITDA, across a 28-slide deck. LegalZoom sells business formation and legal subscriptions in the US: $682 million in revenue, up 3%, with $148 million in adjusted EBITDA, across 30 slides. Shopify processed $292 billion in GMV and earned $8.9 billion in revenue, up 26%, across 53 slides including the appendix.

All figures below come from those February 2025 documents. They are now well over a year old, which is the point: what ages here is the numbers, not the way the argument is built.

Marti is the closest of the three to the position most founders are in — real traction, no proof of profitability yet — and its deck spends its opening on a single idea: there is a hole in the market and it is measurable.

Slide 8 is a world map. Every one of the top 20 economies has an established mobility super app marked on it. Türkiye is blank except for Marti's own logo. One image, one claim, no bullets.

Slide 9 turns the hole into four comparisons. Istanbul has roughly 1 taxi per thousand people against 16 in Paris, 14 in New York and 11 in London. It has 10 metro stations per 100 square kilometres against 290 in Paris. A new car in Türkiye costs 46 times the minimum monthly wage, against 12 times in the US and 7 in France. The argument is not "the market is big" but "here is the specific unpleasantness people live with every day."

Then slide 10 builds a $3 billion revenue opportunity as an explicit multiplication rather than a single borrowed number: 1.3 million daily ride-hailing trips in Istanbul, Istanbul at 45% of Türkiye's taxi market, therefore 2.9 million daily trips nationally, at $9.2 average gross booking value per trip, at a 30.5% global take rate benchmark footnoted to Uber's own Q3 2024 supplemental data. Every step is checkable, which means every step is arguable. That is a feature. A TAM an investor can audit beats a TAM they have to accept.

The move most worth stealing, though, is on slide 16. Marti does not only show what it achieved — 1.6 million unique ride-hailing riders and 255 thousand registered drivers as of December 2024. It puts next to them the target it has publicly committed to for the following quarter: 1.9 million riders and 290 thousand drivers by March 31, 2025. The previous five quarters sit on the same chart, so a reader can see the trajectory and judge whether the target is plausible.

It also discloses what that growth cost: $26.1 million invested in ride-hailing from launch in October 2022 through June 2024, roughly $1.2 million a month. Saying the number out loud is what makes the next claim — that monetization began in October 2024 and marks an inflection point — sound like a plan rather than a hope.

One caution. Guidance is a debt. Marti's deck commits to $34.0 million of 2025 revenue, more than double 2024, and to adjusted EBITDA swinging from negative $22.5 million to positive $3.0 million. Publishing a number like that buys credibility now and spends it later. Do not put a figure in a deck you are not prepared to be measured against in ninety days.

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LegalZoom's 2024 was not a good growth year and the deck does not pretend otherwise. Revenue rose 3%. Business formations fell from 581 thousand to 482 thousand. Average order value fell from $238 to $219. Subscription ARPU fell from $277 to $263.

Every one of those numbers is in the deck. The ARPU decline sits on the same page as the subscription unit count rising from 1,545 thousand to 1,766 thousand — the two facts that explain each other, printed together. Hiding the first would have cost more credibility than showing it.

What the deck does instead is change the measure it asks to be judged by. Adjusted EBITDA grew 25%, from $119 million to $148 million, and margin moved from 18% to 22%. Non-GAAP gross profit grew 6%. Sales and marketing fell 2% in absolute terms, to 29% of revenue. The story is no longer how fast the company is growing; it is how much more of each dollar it keeps.

The whole strategy then fits on one slide: three numbered boxes reading optimize the subscription business, reorient go-to-market, leverage AI to deliver expertise. No sub-bullets, no framework diagram. Three things, in order.

The transferable lesson is not about slow growth — most startups reading this are growing fast. It is that when the number you have been selling stops going up, you have to nominate the next one yourself and defend it, before an investor does it for you.

Shopify's deck spends almost no time arguing that ecommerce is a good idea. It spends it proving the business compounds on its own.

Slide 17 shows one merchant cohort — everyone who joined in Q1 2015 — and tracks the revenue it generated every year since. That cohort produced 2.9 times more revenue in 2024 than in its first four quarters, a 12% compound annual growth rate, ten years after signing up. Slide 18 then overlays every cohort from 2015 through 2023 and shows the same curve repeating.

This is the single most copyable slide across all three decks. It requires no scale. A company with eight customers and four quarters of history can build it, and it answers the question early-stage investors actually care about — not how many customers you got, but what happens to them after they arrive.

The market slide arrives only afterwards, on slide 23, and it is deliberately unflattering: an $849 billion global revenue TAM, of which $404 billion sits in the geographies Shopify already operates in, 2% penetrated. A company of that size framing its own position as 2% is a choice — it turns maturity back into runway.

And the growth chart does not flatter either. GMV growth runs 98%, 47%, 12%, 20%, 24% across 2020 to 2024; revenue growth runs 86%, 57%, 21%, 26%, 26%. The 2022 collapse is right there in the middle of the line, unsoftened, which is what makes the reacceleration afterwards believable.

Strip out the stage differences and four habits survive in all three documents. First, a hard number appears within the first three slides — 1.6 million riders, $51 billion of serviceable market, $292 billion of GMV — before any narrative is asked for.

Second, every slide headline is a conclusion rather than a label. "Marti's ride-hailing service's fast growth is exceeding targets." "Our revenue cohorts get stronger over time." "Online legal and compliance is a big opportunity." A reader who only skims the headlines still receives the argument in order. Compare that to a deck whose slides are titled Market, Product, Team.

Third, each deck contains a section that names its growth vectors explicitly and separately — Marti lists organic growth, new cities, take rate and dynamic pricing in four boxes; Shopify lists more products, more geographies, more merchant sizes. Nobody makes the investor infer where the next dollar comes from.

Fourth, there is a source under every number. Statista, eMarketer, the US Census Bureau, Uber's own filings, internal estimates labelled as internal estimates. The footnotes are small and nobody reads them, and their absence would be noticed immediately.

Non-GAAP reconciliation tables, board photographs, forward guidance, a twenty-page appendix and that level of design finish are obligations of being publicly traded, not signals of quality. Reproducing them at seed stage reads as costume. The four habits above cost nothing and transfer completely; the rest can wait until someone requires it of you.

The three decks discussed here are available to download at the end of this article, and there are more of them on the site — alongside investor lists, fundraising material and other resources built for founders who are actively raising.