VC.txt
The pitch deck has been the cornerstone of the fundraising process for 30 years or more.
If you think about it, it's a mammoth waste of everybody's time. It takes time (and often money) for the founders to design, populate and iterate. There's endless versioning. It becomes quickly out of date. It's prone to errors and misinterpretations or miscommunications (e.g. of key metrics). And whilst storytelling itself is absolutely part of the pitch, unless you're a design studio, it doesn't make sense that the 'look and feel' of a deck should correlate with your ability to raise money.
I think this will evolve over the coming years as AI takes over more and more of the 'top-of-funnel' process for VCs and founders alike. One form this could take is a proxy of the 'robots.txt' protocol that allows websites to tell crawlers what they can and can't access, and where the most valuable information (for their purposes) sits.
I can see us trending towards a similar structured data exchange between VCs and founders, where the key top-of-funnel screening data is interchanged in a machine-driven way (imagine a 'vc.txt' and a 'founder.txt', for example). It would massively speed up the information exchange (no need for speculative 'intro' calls), structure the information in a uniform way, help signpost the most important screening criteria, enable automation for more potential 'matchmaking', and perhaps most importantly, break the paradigm that a talented engineer has to waste time finding a designer to build a pitch deck for them.
I'm not saying this will take over the all fundraising, or even a majority of it. But it's inevitable that machines will take on more of the high-volume, low-value elements of all of our jobs, and shortcutting VCs' and founders' paths to getting to calls/coffees with the most relevant and fitting prospects would be awesome.