Hi, I'm Steve. I've spent the last decade in corporate strategy and product roles across enterprise software — long enough to sit through a lot of pitches and watch a lot of deals get done (and not done) on incomplete diligence. I built FirstPass because the part I kept seeing break wasn't the analysis itself. It was that the analysis never got done in the first place.
The angels I know see thirty pitch decks a week. They mean to read each one. They don't. The decks that get a closer look tend to be the ones from people they already know — which is fine, but it's a filter that selects for network strength, not for company quality. The decks from outside the network stack up in a folder, get glanced at on a Sunday, and get a one-line "passing for now" reply.
That's not a thinking problem. It's a triage problem. Real diligence — checking the team's background, sizing the market honestly, pressure-testing the traction story, mapping the competitive set, surfacing the risks — takes two to three hours. Multiply that by thirty decks and you've burned the week.
FirstPass exists to make sure every deck gets the same honest ten minutes of structured analysis, even when you're looking at a stack of thirty. Not so you can skip the founder meeting — so you walk into it asking sharper questions instead of re-deriving the basics.
Every report is structured the same way, on purpose. Consistency is the whole point — when you're comparing companies, you want the same questions asked of each one, in the same order, graded against the same bar.
Founder backgrounds, prior outcomes, depth on the problem they're solving. Red flags around tenure, repeat founder pattern (or lack of it), and gaps in critical roles.
Honest TAM/SAM read — not the deck's number, the defensible one. Why now. Tailwinds and headwinds. The size of the opportunity if they win, and the size if they're 70% right.
What they actually built vs. what they claim. Where the wedge is. Pricing power. Whether the unit economics they're showing actually work at scale, or just at this scale.
Revenue, growth rate, retention proxies, customer concentration. Sanity-checking the numbers against industry norms — is 200% YoY growth impressive at $100k ARR (no), or at $5M ARR (yes)?
Who they're really up against, including the boring incumbents and the well-funded near-neighbors the deck doesn't mention. What forces them to win.
Regulatory, technical, market-timing, key-person, capital-stack. The things that would make this deal go to zero, ranked.
Each section closes with the same two questions: what would you need to believe for this to be a 9/10? And: what's the single sharpest question to ask the founder?
The score is calibrated against a working portfolio mindset, not against optimism. A 7/10 is a strong company most days of the week. A 9 is rare and earned.
If you're an angel and want to try a free report on a deck you're looking at, send it over. If you're building something adjacent and want to compare notes, also send it over. If FirstPass got something wrong on a real deal, definitely send it over — that's how the model gets sharper.
steve@first-pass.ai