A pitch deck template you can fork (with slide-by-slide formatting rules)

I got into Plug In Ventures Pre-Seed Accelerator. It is the second yes I have gotten this year, after a pile of no's I stopped counting in February.

Since January: four accelerator rejections, a dozen investor passes, one full ghost. Every founder post on the internet makes it sound like the yes lands on the first try. It almost never does.

Plug In is an LA-based pre-seed program that backs founders without the pedigree. Nine virtual sessions, four live workshops, a capital network, and a sample SAFE that is homework, not a handshake.

A bit of context on how I got here. I came to the US from India with no network. Sent 300+ cold LinkedIn messages my first year at Ohio State and got 20 replies. That one number is the reason Alma exists today. I taught myself to code from Matlab outward, built Alma solo, shipped it in 90 days, and onboarded 20+ universities.

The hardest part of this acceptance was not the celebration. It was the rejection email that landed the same week and almost buried the good one.

What I am sharing below is not my live deck. It is a template, the same 11-slide structure I used, with every number stripped and every slide annotated with formatting rules so you can fork it for your own raise.

This is teach-by-example. Each slide in the download includes a small FORMAT strip explaining what goes where. The article walks through each slide and what I would sharpen if I pitched again.

Most pitch deck templates ship empty boxes. You get a clean grid and a typeface and very little opinion about what to put in each slot. That is not a template, that is a Google Slides theme.

This one ships my exact slide architecture with formatting rules baked into every page. Placeholder markers show where your content goes. You keep the structure that worked. You plug in your own narrative.