The 12-Slide Pitch Deck Structure That Has Won Over $100M in Funding (With Examples)

There is a reason the same pitch deck structure keeps appearing in the fundraising decks of the world's most successful startups. It isn't convention. It isn't coincidence. It is the result of a century of sales psychology, two decades of venture capital pattern-matching, and the hard-won lesson that investors — like all human decision-makers — follow a predictable cognitive sequence when evaluating a new opportunity. The structure that moves through that sequence most efficiently raises money. The structure that fights it doesn't.

This article documents the 12-slide pitch deck structure that has appeared — in some form — in the fundraising decks of Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Sequoia-backed unicorns, and hundreds of Series A and B rounds that together represent billions in venture capital raised. For each slide, you'll find the strategic purpose, the specific content it should contain, what experienced investors are actually looking for when they read it, and the most common mistakes that cause founders to lose the room before they've finished the deck.

Why Pitch Deck Structure Matters More Than Pitch Deck Design

Most first-time founders spend their pitch deck preparation time in the wrong order. They open a design tool, choose a template, and start building slides — making visual decisions before they've resolved narrative decisions. The result is a deck that looks polished but doesn't flow: compelling individual slides that don't build on each other, a story that jumps from problem to solution to traction without the connective tissue that makes the investment case feel inevitable rather than assembled.

Structure is the narrative architecture of a pitch. It determines the order in which the investor encounters information, which questions get answered before they've formed into objections, and whether the deck creates momentum — each slide making the next one more credible — or reads as a list of independent claims. A well-structured pitch with average design will outperform a beautifully designed pitch with poor structure in almost every case, because investors fund the story before they fund the slides.

💡 Key Insight: The average venture investor spends 3 minutes and 44 seconds reviewing a pitch deck, according to DocSend's analysis of over 200 fundraising rounds. The slides that receive the most time: the Team slide, the Financials slide, and the Business Model slide — in that order. Your structure determines whether the investor even reaches those slides with an open mind.

The 12-Slide Pitch Deck Structure: A Complete Breakdown

This structure draws from Guy Kawasaki's 10-slide framework, Sequoia Capital's pitch guidance, and the decks of Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Buffer, BuzzFeed, Mint, and dozens of other publicly available fundraising decks that have been studied extensively by the VC and startup community. It has been adapted and extended to reflect the information requirements of 2026's investor expectations — which are meaningfully higher than they were during the zero-interest-rate era.

Slide 1: The Title Slide — Company, Category, and Memorable Hook

The title slide is not a formality. It is the first data point an investor uses to calibrate their expectations for the rest of the deck. It should contain four elements: your company name, your logo, a one-line company descriptor that communicates category and value proposition simultaneously, and your contact information. The one-liner is the most critical component — it should tell the investor exactly what category this business operates in and why it matters, in under twelve words.

What investors are looking for: Clarity of category and instant comprehension of the business type. An investor who reads your title slide and has to think hard about what category you're in is already mildly frustrated — and mild frustration compounds through a deck.

Real example: Airbnb's original 2009 seed deck opened with "AirBed & Breakfast — Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels." Category (short-term rental), differentiator (local, not hotel), audience (travellers) — all in eight words. Uber's early investor materials used "Everyone's private driver" — three words that communicated the entire product vision and market category.

Common mistake: Using a tagline instead of a descriptor. "Redefining how the world connects" tells an investor nothing. "AI-powered fleet management for last-mile logistics" tells them everything.

Slide 2: The Problem — Make the Pain Impossible to Ignore

The problem slide is where your pitch's emotional foundation is built. It needs to do one thing above all others: make the investor feel the pain you're solving. Not understand it intellectually. Feel it. The most effective problem slides describe a specific, relatable situation in which a real person experiences a measurable, frustrating, or costly problem — and then quantify the scale of that problem in market terms.

The structure that works consistently: a specific scenario (the customer's experience of the problem in a single sentence), the root cause (why the problem exists), and the cost (what it costs the customer in time, money, or quality of outcome). All three in three bullet points or fewer. A problem slide with more than five lines of text is almost certainly trying to solve too many things — which signals that the founding team hasn't identified their core insight yet.

What investors are looking for: Evidence that the founding team has deep, firsthand understanding of the customer's problem — not secondhand research. The best problem slides feel like they were written by someone who has lived the problem, not studied it.

Real example: Mint's pitch deck opened with the problem: managing personal finances requires logging into multiple bank sites, manually exporting spreadsheets, and spending hours categorising transactions. The specificity of "multiple bank sites," "manually exporting," and "hours" communicated that the founder had done this themselves — not hypothesised that users might find it difficult.

Common mistake: Starting with a market size statistic ("The global X market is worth $Y billion") before establishing the problem. Investors don't care about market size until they care about the problem. Lead with pain, not addressable market.

Slide 3: The Solution — The Simplest Possible Explanation

The solution slide is where most founders over-engineer and under-communicate. They want to explain how the product works, showcase its features, demonstrate its technical sophistication, and pre-empt every possible question about implementation. The result is a slide that overwhelms rather than clarifies — and causes investors to focus on complexity rather than value.

The solution slide has one job: make the investor understand, in thirty seconds, what the product does and why it solves the problem you just described better than any existing alternative. The format that achieves this most reliably is a one-sentence product description followed by three specific benefits — not features, benefits. The distinction matters: a feature is what the product does; a benefit is what the customer gains.

What investors are looking for: An insight — a specific, non-obvious reason why your approach to this problem is meaningfully better than what already exists. Solutions that solve problems in the obvious way rarely attract venture capital. Solutions that solve problems in a way that only becomes obvious in hindsight are what VCs pay multiples for.

Real example: Dropbox's solution slide (and its famous explainer video) focused on a single insight: instead of moving files between devices, make every device think it's the same device. One idea. Zero technical jargon. Immediately comprehensible to a non-technical investor.

Slide 4: The Market Opportunity — Size, Growth, and Segmentation

Market sizing is where founders most frequently either undersell (citing a narrow TAM that makes the opportunity look small) or oversell (citing a global TAM that makes the numbers look impressive but the analysis look lazy). The slide that actually builds investor confidence shows three levels of market: the Total Addressable Market (TAM — everyone who could potentially benefit), the Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM — the portion you can realistically reach with your current model), and the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM — the share you're targeting in a defined time horizon). The SOM is the number that matters most; it's the one investors will hold you to.

What investors are looking for: A bottom-up market sizing methodology — not a top-down "we're targeting 1% of a $50B market" calculation, which every investor has seen ten thousand times and dismisses immediately. Bottom-up means: X customers of profile Y, each paying $Z per year, equals a SOM of $XYZ million. That calculation shows that you understand your customer, your pricing, and your sales capacity — not just that you can multiply two large numbers.

Common mistake: Citing a research firm's market size number without decomposing it. "According to Gartner, the market is $80B" is not market analysis. It is market citation — and it tells the investor nothing about how much of that $80B you can actually access.

Slide 5: The Product — Show, Don't Describe

The product slide is where the abstract becomes concrete. After establishing the problem and the solution conceptually, this slide shows the investor what the product actually looks like — and the emphasis should be on looks like rather than works like. Screenshots, a short product demo GIF, or a mockup of the product in use communicates more about product quality, maturity, and differentiation than any amount of descriptive bullet points.

For pre-product companies, high-fidelity mockups serve the same function — they demonstrate that the founding team has thought through the product experience in detail, not just the product concept. A thoughtfully designed mockup on this slide does triple duty: it shows the product vision, it signals design quality, and it makes the value proposition tangible in a way that words never can.

What investors are looking for: Evidence that the product is real, that it's been thought through at the execution level (not just the concept level), and that the user experience is as considered as the underlying technology. Great product design on this slide increases perceived product quality, reduces risk assessment, and accelerates investment conviction.

Common mistake: Using system screenshots that show the full interface complexity — every menu, every option, every configuration setting. Show one key workflow, beautifully executed. The investor isn't trying to evaluate feature completeness on this slide; they're forming an opinion about product quality and ambition.

Slide 6: The Business Model — How You Make Money

The business model slide answers the question every investor has been asking since slide two: how does this company make money, and why is that model defensible? It should cover four elements clearly: revenue model (subscription, transactional, freemium, marketplace, etc.), pricing (actual numbers — not "pricing available on request"), unit economics (ideally, a simple version of CAC and LTV or margin per transaction), and monetisation timeline (when does the typical customer become revenue-generating).

The business model slide is the second most scrutinised slide in any deck (after Team) according to investor reading time data. Investors spend disproportionate time here because it's where the investment thesis either becomes defensible or falls apart. A compelling problem and impressive traction are irrelevant if the economics of the business model can't scale — and this is the slide where that becomes apparent.

What investors are looking for: A business model where revenue scales faster than costs — the fundamental condition of a venture-scale business. A services business, where revenue is directly proportional to headcount, rarely attracts venture capital. A software business where a tenth customer costs the same to serve as the first is the venture model. Make sure this slide makes that distinction clear.

Real example: LinkedIn's Series B deck included a slide specifically showing multiple revenue streams (premium subscriptions, job listings, advertising) and explaining that the network effect created by free users made each paid product more valuable. The structural argument — free scale drives paid value — was the business model insight that justified the investment.

Slide 7: Traction — The Numbers That Prove It's Working

Traction is the most credibility-building slide in any pitch deck. It is also the slide that most founders get wrong — either by presenting metrics that don't demonstrate commercial progress, or by cherry-picking metrics to avoid showing the ones that reveal problems. Investors have pattern-matched thousands of traction slides and can identify both of those failure modes in seconds.

The traction slide should lead with the metric that most directly reflects your core business health — for a SaaS product, that's ARR or MRR with growth rate; for a marketplace, it's GMV and take rate; for a consumer product, it's DAU/MAU with retention cohorts. Show the trend, not just the current number. A traction chart that shows 300% YoY growth is far more compelling than a single metric that says "$2M ARR" — because the trend communicates trajectory, not just current state.

What investors are looking for: Product-market fit signals — evidence that customers are not just using the product, but that they would be significantly impaired if it disappeared. Retention cohorts, NPS scores, or a handful of specific customer quotes that express genuine dependency are the most powerful traction signals available to an early-stage company.

Real example: Airbnb's 2009 seed deck showed a traction chart that was, by modern standards, extremely modest — but it showed consistent week-on-week growth with no paid acquisition. The organic growth rate was the signal, not the absolute number. The investor insight: something is working that the company doesn't fully understand yet, and that's worth funding to find out what.

Common mistake: Showing vanity metrics — total signups, downloads, page views — without the engagement or revenue metrics that determine whether those users have found value. An investor who sees 100,000 signups immediately asks "and how many are active?" If your traction slide doesn't answer that question, you've created an objection instead of building confidence.

Slide 8: The Competitive Landscape — Context, Not a Feature Matrix

The competitive landscape slide is the one most commonly done badly — and the one where a well-executed approach generates disproportionate investor confidence. Most founders show a feature comparison matrix where their product has a checkmark in every column and every competitor has an X somewhere. Every investor has seen this slide ten thousand times and discounts it immediately, because a founder designing their own competitive comparison will always make their product look best.

The approach that works: a two-axis positioning map that places your product in a white space — a combination of the two most strategically important dimensions of the market where no existing competitor operates. This communicates your positioning thesis, not just your feature set. The axes themselves tell the investor what you think the market is really competing on, which demonstrates strategic insight rather than product marketing.

What investors are looking for: Acknowledgement that strong competitors exist — not denial. "We have no competitors" is one of the most reliably negative signals a founder can send. It means either the market doesn't exist (in which case, why build this?), or the founder hasn't done the competitive research (in which case, should I trust their market analysis on any of the other slides?). The winning move is: here are the serious competitors, here is what they do well, here is the specific thing they cannot do without fundamentally changing their business model — and that is our strategic white space.

Slide 9: The Go-to-Market Strategy — Specific, Sequenced, and Credible

The go-to-market slide answers the question investors are always asking during the traction and market slides: "OK, but how do you actually get customers?" It should articulate your primary acquisition channel, the unit economics of that channel (CAC, conversion rate at each stage), and your land-and-expand strategy — how a customer who enters through your cheapest channel becomes your most valuable customer over time.

For early-stage companies, the most credible GTM slide is a focused one. It describes the single channel that has already demonstrated traction, explains why that channel works given the customer profile and the product, and outlines the next channel that becomes available as the company scales. A GTM slide that lists ten channels communicates that the team hasn't figured out what's working yet. A GTM slide that describes one channel with documented CAC and conversion data communicates that they have.

What investors are looking for: Channel-product fit — evidence that the way you're acquiring customers makes sense given what the product is and who uses it. A consumer app with a content marketing GTM and a B2B enterprise product with a product-led self-serve GTM are both coherent. A consumer app with an enterprise outbound sales GTM raises an immediate structural question about whether the economics can ever work.

Slide 10: The Team — Why You Are the Right People to Win This

The team slide receives more investor attention than any other slide in the deck — because at the early stages of a company, investors are not primarily funding a product or a market. They are funding a group of people's ability to navigate uncertainty, make non-obvious decisions, and build something that doesn't yet exist. The team slide is the primary evidence for or against that investment thesis.

The most effective team slides are not CVs reformatted as bullet points. They are narrative claims — short paragraphs or paired headlines and credentials that answer the single most important question for each founding team member: "Why is this person uniquely positioned to win in this market?" That answer must include some combination of domain expertise (deep knowledge of the customer's world), technical capability (the ability to build the product), and distribution advantage (the ability to sell it to the right early customers).

What investors are looking for: The "unfair advantage" signal — evidence that this team has access to something (relationships, proprietary data, domain knowledge, or technical capability) that makes them more likely to succeed in this specific market than any other team that could assemble around the same opportunity. If an investor reads your team slide and thinks "a well-resourced competitor could hire an equally qualified team in six months," your team slide hasn't done its job.

Real example: Uber's early team slide leaned heavily on the founders' prior experience in logistics and mobile technology — making the argument that the team had spent years building the specific technical and operational competence that Uber's model required. The claim wasn't just "we're smart people." It was "we are the people who already know how to solve this problem."

Slide 11: Financial Projections — Ambitious, Defensible, and Model-Based

Financial projections at the early stage are not a prediction. They are a model — a set of assumptions about customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, pricing, and costs, translated into revenue and expense trajectories. Every experienced investor knows that five-year projections for a pre-Series A company are not accurate forecasts. What they are evaluating is whether the founding team understands their business model well enough to build a coherent model, and whether the assumptions underlying the projections are defensible when challenged.

The projections slide should show a three-to-five year revenue model, key cost drivers, and the point at which the business reaches cash-flow breakeven. For pre-revenue or early-revenue companies, include the key unit economics (CAC, LTV, gross margin) that the projections are built on. The slide is most effective as a visual chart rather than a spreadsheet — the visual communicates the growth trajectory and the breakeven inflection point more clearly than a table of numbers.

What investors are looking for: The question "what has to be true for these projections to be right?" should be answerable from the slide itself. If your Year 3 revenue projection requires 40% monthly growth in new customer acquisition, the slide (or the supporting notes) should acknowledge that assumption and explain why it's achievable given the current trend. Projections presented without underlying assumptions are easily dismissed. Projections explained through their assumptions are the basis of an actual investment conversation.

Common mistake: "Hockey stick" projections that are flat for two years and then show exponential growth in Year 3 with no explanation of what changes in Year 3. Every investor sees dozens of these per month. The hockey stick needs a mechanism — the specific event (a product launch, a distribution partnership, a new channel opening) that explains the inflection.

Slide 12: The Ask — Specific, Purposeful, and Milestone-Anchored

The ask slide is the most underbuilt slide in the average pitch deck — and it's the slide that closes the meeting or leaves it open-ended. Founders who reach the ask slide after eleven slides of compelling content and then say "we're raising $X at a valuation of $Y" are leaving the most important conversion work undone. The ask needs to do three things: state the amount clearly, explain what the capital will be used for (in specific allocation terms, not generic categories), and describe the milestones the company will reach by the end of the funding period that will make the next round of funding a straightforward conversation.

The use-of-funds breakdown should be specific enough to be credible but not so granular that it reads as a budget rather than a strategy. Three to five line items (product development: 40%, sales and marketing: 35%, operations: 15%, team: 10%) communicated as percentages or dollar amounts demonstrates that the founding team has thought carefully about what they need to build the next version of the company.

What investors are looking for: Milestone clarity — specifically, "what will be true in 18–24 months as a result of this funding?" that makes the Series A (or the next round) achievable. The best ask slides present the investment as a milestone-purchase: you give us $X, and we will deliver specific outcomes Y and Z that make the next round of financing logical and easy. This framing transforms the ask from a request into a transaction.

Common mistake: Not including a valuation or a clear funding amount. "We're raising a round" is not an ask. It's a conversation opener that leaves the investor doing the founder's work. Come with a number, a cap table summary if relevant, and a clear explanation of the milestones the capital enables.

Pitch Deck Structure at a Glance: The 12-Slide Reference Table

Use this reference table during your pitch deck build process to validate that each slide is fulfilling its specific strategic purpose before you move to the next one.

The 7 Pitch Deck Mistakes That Kill Investor Interest

Knowing what to include is half the picture. Knowing what destroys investor confidence — even in a deck with strong fundamentals — is equally important.

Mistake 1: Slides That Are Too Dense to Read in 20 Seconds

Each slide should communicate one idea clearly enough to be understood in twenty seconds or less. A slide that requires reading time greater than twenty seconds is asking the investor to do cognitive work that the founder should have done during the deck preparation. The rule: one slide, one claim, maximum three supporting data points. Everything else belongs in the appendix or the verbal pitch.

Mistake 2: Claiming No Competition

This is the single fastest way to signal inexperience to a sophisticated investor. Every product competes with something — at minimum, it competes with the status quo (doing nothing, using spreadsheets, using the manual process your product replaces). Claiming no competition suggests either that the market doesn't exist or that the founding team hasn't done adequate research. Either interpretation reduces investment conviction.

Mistake 3: Asking for Funding Without Specifying Milestones

"We're raising $2M" is a transaction request. "We're raising $2M to reach $1M ARR and 50 enterprise customers by Q4 2026, which positions us for a Series A at a $15–20M valuation" is an investment thesis. The second formulation gives the investor a clear picture of what they're buying and what the exit opportunity from this round looks like. The first gives them nothing to evaluate except whether they like the number.

Mistake 4: Leading With the Solution Before Establishing the Problem

Founders who are deeply embedded in their product frequently lead with the solution — jumping straight to "what we've built" before making the investor feel the problem the product solves. Without the problem being established first, the solution slide has no emotional foundation. The investor is evaluating a product feature set rather than a response to pain — and feature evaluation is a much harder path to investment conviction than emotional resonance with a problem.

Mistake 5: Poor Visual Design That Signals Low Production Standards

A pitch deck is not just a document. It is a physical artefact of your company's standards. A deck with inconsistent typography, low-quality images, misaligned elements, and generic template design communicates — before a single word is read — that the company has low production standards. For a product company, this is damaging. For a design-adjacent company, it is fatal. The deck's visual quality is a proxy for the quality of everything else the company produces.

Mistake 6: Projections Without Assumptions

A financial projection slide that shows a revenue curve without any explanation of the assumptions underlying it is not analysis — it's optimism formatted as data. Experienced investors will spend zero time on this slide because there's nothing to evaluate. Projections gain credibility from the assumptions they're built on, not from the numbers themselves.

Mistake 7: Decks That Are Too Long

The 12-slide structure is not a minimum — it is close to a maximum for the first-pass investor deck. Every slide beyond twelve is an additional cognitive demand on an investor who is reviewing your deck as one of twenty that week. If your story requires more than twelve slides to tell, the problem is not deck length — it's story clarity. A pitch that requires twenty slides to make its case is a pitch that hasn't identified its most important ideas yet.

⚠️ The appendix strategy: Everything that doesn't fit in the 12-slide core deck — detailed financial models, full competitive analysis, technical architecture, team bios, customer case studies — should go in a well-organised appendix. The appendix is not a dumping ground; it is the material you surface when an investor's questions in the meeting signal interest in a specific area. A well-prepared appendix turns a pitch meeting into a due diligence conversation.

The Complete Pitch Deck Checklist for 2026

Before sending your pitch deck to a single investor, run it against every item on this checklist. Each unchecked item is a vulnerability that an experienced investor will find and probe — better to find it yourself first.

Structure & Narrative

Content Quality

Design & Presentation Quality

The Bottom Line on Pitch Deck Structure

The 12-slide pitch deck structure documented here is not a formula that guarantees funding. Nothing does. But it is the structural architecture that moves an investor through the specific cognitive sequence — from problem awareness to solution understanding to market credibility to team conviction to investment action — most efficiently and most reliably. Decks that deviate from this sequence without a strong reason to do so are fighting cognitive friction that their competitors aren't fighting.

The founders who raise most efficiently in 2026 are not the ones with the best products or the largest markets — though those things matter. They are the ones who understand that a pitch deck is a sales document, that its audience is a specific type of decision-maker with specific cognitive needs and specific pattern-matching biases, and that the structure of the document either works with those patterns or works against them. Work with them. Build the 12 slides in the right order, with the right content in each, and let the structure carry the weight that most founders try to carry with enthusiasm alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many slides should a pitch deck have? The optimal pitch deck for a seed to Series A fundraise is 10–14 slides, with 12 being the most commonly cited ideal length by experienced VCs and angel investors. Guy Kawasaki's original "10/20/30 rule" (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point minimum font) remains a useful benchmark, though most modern investors expect slightly more substance — particularly on traction, business model, and financial projections. What matters is that each slide earns its place by answering a specific investor question. A 15-slide deck where every slide is necessary is better than a 10-slide deck where three slides are padding. The appendix can be unlimited — it is the core deck that should be ruthlessly edited to twelve or fewer.

What do investors look for most in a pitch deck? According to DocSend's analysis of over 200 fundraising rounds, investors spend the most time on three slides: Team, Financials, and Business Model — in that order. At the early stage, the team slide carries the most weight because investors are primarily funding people's ability to execute under uncertainty. The financials and business model slides carry the second most weight because they determine whether the company can become venture-scale — whether revenue grows faster than costs. The traction slide is the most credibility-building slide when the numbers are strong, because it converts the investment thesis from a hypothesis into an evidence-based conviction.

What is the difference between a seed pitch deck and a Series A pitch deck? The 12-slide structure is the same at both stages — but the evidence required to fill each slide convincingly is dramatically different. At seed stage, investors are primarily funding team and insight: the problem understanding, the solution thesis, and the founding team's ability to execute. Traction may be early or absent; financials are projections. At Series A, investors are funding proven product-market fit and the scaling mechanism: the traction slide needs to show consistent growth with strong retention cohorts, the business model slide needs to show positive or improving unit economics, and the financial projections need to be grounded in demonstrated acquisition rates and conversion metrics. A Series A investor using the same deck template as a seed investor is the most reliable way to receive a "come back when you have more traction" response.

How important is pitch deck design for fundraising? Design quality matters significantly — not because investors are primarily evaluating aesthetics, but because design quality functions as a trust signal and a proxy for production standards. A deck with inconsistent visual design, low-quality images, or generic template aesthetics communicates that the company has low standards for output quality. For product companies, this creates a dissonance between what the founders claim their product quality is and what the quality of their pitch document demonstrates. Research from DocSend shows that decks with professional visual design receive longer average reading times — not because investors are admiring the design, but because polished decks read more efficiently and signal a higher level of preparation that makes investors more likely to engage deeply with the content.

Should a pitch deck be sent before or after the first investor meeting? Both contexts require slightly different deck configurations. The "send ahead" deck — used for cold outreach or warm intro contexts where the investor reviews the deck before deciding whether to take a meeting — needs to be highly self-explanatory as a standalone document. Every claim needs to be evidenced on the slide itself, because there is no verbal pitch to fill gaps. The "meeting deck" — used as a visual aid during a live 30-minute pitch — should be simpler and more visual, designed to anchor verbal explanations rather than replace them. Many experienced founders maintain two versions: a full narrative deck for email send, and a stripped-back visual version for live presentations.

What are the most common pitch deck mistakes that kill fundraising? The seven most investment-killing pitch deck mistakes are: slides that are too dense to read in 20 seconds; claiming no competition (signals naivety or insufficient research); asking for funding without specifying milestones or use-of-funds allocation; leading with the solution before establishing the problem emotionally; poor visual design that signals low production standards; financial projections presented without their underlying assumptions; and a deck that is too long — more than 14 slides in the core deck (not appendix). The single highest-impact fix for the majority of underperforming pitch decks is structural: move the problem slide to slide two, ensure it establishes genuine pain before slide three introduces the solution, and cut every slide that doesn't directly answer a specific investor question the company would prefer to address proactively.