An executive summary is a 1 to 3 page prose document summarizing a startup's business, market, financials, team, and capital ask for investors. It covers business model, traction, market opportunity, and the capital ask, more substantive than a one-pager and more concise than a full business plan. It's used as a companion artifact to a pitch deck for investors who prefer prose, as a leave-behind that captures more nuance than slides allow, and as a primary artifact in some institutional-investor processes (especially family offices, growth-equity firms, and corporate-venture groups). It is the format that bridges the visual-heavy pitch deck and the written depth of a business plan.
The structure of a typical investor execu...