Pitch Deck Teardown: Tanbii’s $1.5M pre-seed deck

About a year ago, I tore down a pitch deck by Mi Terro, founded by Robert Luo. Guess who’s back with another company? Luo has raised $1.5 million for Tanbii from a Hong Kong family office.

In general, I would be suspicious of a founder raising money for a second startup less than a year after they got funded for another. I’m eager to see how that’s been addressed in the Tanbii deck.

As for Mi Terro? It’s still going: “Mi Terro is doing amazingly well. We gained a lot of great traction and plan to raise another round later this year,” Luo told me in an email.

Of course, this puts me in an exciting situation: I get to look back at what I said could be improved in Mi Terro’s pitch deck (market sizing, traction, and the absence of a competition slide) last year and see how the founder has addressed these issues for his new company.

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We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. 

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Slides in this deck

1. Cover slide
2. Problem slide
3. Solution slide
4. Product slide “Web 5.0 Metaverse”
5. Value proposition slide
6. How it works slide
7. How Tanbii connects virtual and reality slide
8. Product features slide
9. Target audience slide
10.   Future vision slide (“Personal Carbon Credits”)
11.   Market size (TAM/SAM/SOM)
12.   Partnerships slide
13.   Competitive landscape slide
14.   Go to market slide (“University Ambassador Program”)
15.   Roadmap and Business Model slide
16.   Team slide
17.   Advisory board
18.   Contact and Closing slide

Three things to love

Right out of the box, I love that the company’s founder is staying in the same industry (carbon reduction) as his previous company. It makes it easy to accept the narrative that while building one company, he saw an opportunity for another.

Bold problem statement

On slide 2, the company comes out of the gate with a clear problem: consumer carbon emissions.

Tanbii is presuming that people care about their own personal CO2 emissions, and it seems that’s not a bad call: A large survey and research study from Yale shows that 65% of people believe that citizens should do more to address global warming. On the other hand, only 35% of respondents discuss global warming from time to time. The survey didn’t ask whether people are struggling to find ways to make an impact.

Most people agree that reducing CO2 is a good idea, even though it seems many of us are feeling pretty powerless, which is the problem space Tanbii is buzzing into.

A hell of an advisory board

On its very last content slide, Tanbii drops a bomb: It’s got an incredible advisory board full of people who seem pretty relevant to the company’s overall mission and vision.

I’m often pretty skeptical of advisory boards, and if I were considering investing, I’d pick up the phone and contact some of these folks to see how closely they are working with Tanbii. I’m not saying this is the case here, but I’ve often had reference calls with advisory board members who go, “Wait, who?” and have literally no idea who the founder is or what the company does. So if you put someone on a slide, make sure they know and are prepared to receive a call out of the blue.

A quick LinkedIn search shows that Bulteel lists being an adviser to Mi Terro, but none of the other advisers advertise their association with Tanbii. I also discovered that there were a bunch of little mistakes on this slide: “Davids” should be “David” and “Warshauser” should be “Warshauer.” The next step would definitely be a call or two to find out what’s going on here.

Assuming that’s all in order, yes, this is a hell of an advisory board.

Hello, competitors

I gave the founder grief for the lack of a competition slide in the previous deck. Luckily, Tanbii’s deck has one!

There’s no shortage of carbon management platforms, and a good and helpful comparison between them is table stakes for a deck like this. I’ll definitely give Tanbii some side-eye for using “Web5” as an advantage, but I do love a good comparison chart and this one is easy to read and understand. It’s a good way to communicate what’s happening in your market.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Tanbii could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!