The Death of the 100-Page Pitch Deck: Avi Solomon on Raising Millions Smarter

Steven Weinstock: 0:01 Hi everyone, and welcome to the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock. I've been investing in real estate for over 20 years. Started out with single family homes, moved on to multi-family properties, and I recently launched my own real estate fund. This podcast is brought to you by WE Capital on the Goethals Capital Fund, where we buy properties in cash. We lock in deep discounts, eliminate the mortgage risk upfront, and later on we refinance. This is not about me. It's about operators, deal makers, strategists, and high performers who are building real results in real time. And today's guest is exactly that. Today I'm sitting down with Avi Solomon. He recently got out of his bomb shelter. He's living in Israel and he's the CEO of Pulse, a company helping real estate operators ditch the outdated PowerPoint and upgrade to something smarter. Avi is transforming how he pitched deals to investors using real time interactive AI powered pitch decks designed to actually engage capital allocators. His work is used by everyone from syndicators to institutional firms who are tired of 40 page PDFs that do not move the needle. Avi's background mixes tech, design and psychology, and he's using it all to help sponsors raise capital with more clarity and confidence. Let's dive in. Avi, thank you for joining me. Are you in the bomb shelter as we speak? Avi Solomon: 1:36 No, but it's very kind of you to have me, Steven. I appreciate it. We spent a lot of the last few weeks in and around bomb shelters, but now thanks to your wonderful president we are currently living life large. Steven Weinstock: 1:56 I'm glad to hear. Just for the audience, tell us where in Israel are you? Near Gaza? Are you near Syria? Where are you? Avi Solomon: 2:04 I am in the holy city of Jerusalem. I am, thankfully, as far away from the dangers as I possibly could be but still got our fair share of sirens. Steven Weinstock: 2:18 I can only imagine. What was the moment or the deal that made you say the way we pitch real estate could be improved or the way we pitch real estate deals is broken? Avi Solomon: 2:37 That's a really good question. It was really from day one, the moment that I saw an OM. You said in the intro 40 pages. I think that's kind. Most of these deals are 70 to a hundred pages. I've seen a hundred plus page OMs and quite frankly my job, when I was an institutional capital raiser, was made very difficult by these things. I had to present these vast, long presentations to investors. And even the most sophisticated of investors does not simply have the time to read a hundred pages of information. The story that I like to tell is when I had a deal, it was a $5 million raise or something like that, and I essentially had to send this big book of information along with the Excel sheets and the term sheets and all the different documents associated with the deal. An investor eventually got back and said they're interested in learning more about the deal. So I had to go to the GPs and say this group is interested, let's find a time to get both of you on the phone. That whole back and forth ended up taking a couple of weeks. And I remember being on this call probably three weeks after I had initially sent that document and the investor pulls up the document, which was version 55 or whatever, and the GPs go, oh, you don't have version 79 that we're up to. And the investor's like no. And the GPs like, oh my gosh, we've changed so much. That was really the moment that I was like, enough is enough. Steven Weinstock: 5:57 When I started raising capital for my deals back in 2017 ish I hired somebody to create this PDF. And I thought, wow, this is great. It's got a picture of me, it gives a little bio, it's got all these numbers. And I thought I could just send this out and I'm good to go. And over the course of that raise I realized that I would send these out and some people read every detail of it and some people would respond saying, gimme the highlights. Avi Solomon: 9:09 We're in the 21st century. Do you know what year the PDF was invented? The answer is 1993. And of course communication, if you think about where communication in general technologically speaking has come from the early nineties to now. Nothing that we use is from before the 21st century. Look around, look at your phone, look at your laptop. We are light years ahead in terms of communication from where we were even 10 years ago, but certainly 30 plus years ago. So what is an interactive deck? An interactive deck is a web-based communication device which essentially flows and looks and is laid out in a similar way to your typical PDF or PowerPoint presentation. However, it implements a whole bunch of different web-based tools. From simple features like video and scroll throughs, and the ability to click on buttons. We implement something that we call depth, which means that within each slide or within each frame, we're able to present a lot of information that people can click through and explore. We'll include maps, we'll include different apps that you can use directly within the deck. The other aspect is that it's live. So that kind of gets back to the issues we were discussing before with the version four and the version 75. The information is constantly live, so as soon as we update the information on the backend, investors see the most up-to-date information. It's mobile friendly. We can include essentially all information that could possibly be required within a deal into the deck in a very clean and clear way. We can have data rooms directly within the deck. The various different documents and the term sheets, you can have NDAs, all of that living within this deck. Steven Weinstock: 14:05 If I'm raising $6 million for a hundred unit property in Kentucky, how would using a pitch deck from Pulse give me an edge in this process? Avi Solomon: 14:10 It would set you apart from everyone else and provide your investors an experience that they engage with. Think about it, if you are an investor and you have 10 deals that come your way, you have to essentially filter out what deals you even want to look at before you look at them. Especially because the PDFs that you are seeing are 40, 50, 60 pages long and you have no interest in looking through all of them. So what you have to do as the GP is create something that is actually engaging. You have to create something that is different. When you are presenting a deal, you are presenting much more than just a few figures and the location. What you are presenting is a thesis. Your thesis is, I'm gonna be able to get you this level of returns. And then you have to back that up with evidence in all sorts of different forms. That's when you've won an investor. That's when an investor goes from potential to interested. And then you're not done yet. You have to convert interest into investment. So what you need to do is create a very simple call to action. We'll implement something like a calendar invite directly into the deck or have a little survey. Best case scenario, they go straight to your investor portal directly from the deck and just put in the money right there. Whereas most PDFs end with a little page that says thank you so much, if you're interested please reach out to us at info at whatever. That doesn't do it. The conversion rate on an interactive deck is significantly higher than that of a regular PDF.