PowerPoint Makeover: Coinbase

2021 was an eventful year for Coinbase, full of milestones. The company went public in April, and it’s now valued at about $50 billion. These achievements were reached as demand for cryptocurrency soared, and Bitcoin’s value increased tenfold in just a year.

Who could have imagined the heights Coinbase would reach when the company launched in 2012? Another product of the Y Combinator startup incubator program, Coinbase founder received $150,000 to start his company. Armstrong developed a platform where people can buy, sell and manage cryptocurrency from their mobile devices. As the popularity of cryptocurrency has skyrocketed, so has the success of Coinbase, which is still the most popular consumer-facing cryptoasset exchange in the United States.

Today, Coinbase is the go-to platform for anyone interested in investing in cryptocurrency. Of course, Coinbase’s success didn’t happen overnight, and the company had to jump through its share of hurdles to get where it is today. Some of those hurdles naturally included funding rounds, including when Armstrong and co-founder Fred Ehrsam raised $600,000 in all-important seed capital in 2012.

Like so many other ventures, Coinbase started with a pitch, presented at the Y Combinator demo day (and again in meetings with investors) with an engaging slide deck. We took a look at the Coinbase pitch deck, and while we feel it’s a decent enough effort, we wanted to see how we could improve upon it with a little help from artificial intelligence. 

The original Coinbase pitch deck was short, sweet and to the point, and it boasted a fairly cohesive design for a typical PowerPoint-esque frankendeck. Still, we thought we could add some extra pizzazz, making the design “beautiful.” How do you think we did?

Get the Coinbase presentation template here.

The theme:

It’s simple to create professional, cohesive designs with Beautiful.ai. We started the PowerPoint makeover by customizing a theme that will apply to every slide added to the presentation. We selected a color palette in accordance with Coinbase’s brand style guide, and set the fonts that will apply to any text added to the presentation. Finally, we selected the Coinbase logo from Beautiful.ai’s library of free stock photos, icons and logos, and we placed the logo into the footer, where it will appear on every slide.

Slide 1: Coinbase title slide

There was nothing wrong with the Coinbase original pitch deck’s title slide, as it featured a balanced design, branded colors and an engaging graphic. We recreated it using our Headline Smart Slide template, where we focused on the company’s name as the deck’s title. We then sourced an appropriately engaging image of a smartphone from our free image library, and we placed it on the right side of the slide. Creating a balanced yet engaging slide was a snap with Beautiful.ai. The AI edits the design each time content is added, always basing its choices on professional principles of good design.

Slide 2: Bitcoin

The next slide in our redesigned Coinbase pitch deck introduces Bitcoin, which in 2012 was a new form of digital currency. Just as in Coinbase’s original pitch deck, we designed a simple slide with limited information, a decision that lets the founders do the talking when they pitch their company. To highlight Bitcoin, we used our Icons with Text Smart Slide template, and chose relevant icons from our free image library. The fonts and colors were automatically matched to the deck thanks to our preselected theme.

Slide 3: Transaction milestone

Pitch decks often boldly showcase company milestones, which can make a big impact on potential investors, and Coinbase was no exception. We again chose Beautiful.ai’s Headline slide template to highlight Coinbase’s transaction milestone of $2 million per day. The slide was simple to create thanks to the branded theme, and we added an engaging image of Coinbase in use, which was perfectly positioned by our AI.

Slide 4: Coinbase wordcloud

Coinbase’s original pitch deck next featured a slide with a word cloud, which is a great data visualization for tying together a variety of concepts. What do you want your audience to think about when they envision your brand? We recreated the word cloud using our Word Cloud slide template, and we have to say our design stands out as more visually appealing compared to the original. Creating it was a cinch: We just entered the words we wanted to include in the cloud, and watched as our AI designed the infographic. We added some extra pizzazz to the slide by including an engaging photo on the side, selected from Beautiful.ai’s vast library of free stock images.

Slide 5: Bitcoin wallet

In its original pitch deck, Coinbase established itself as a Bitcoin wallet, a solution to the then-lack of user-friendly tools to manage cryptocurrency. We illustrated this solution using our Photo Grid Smart Slide template. Our preselected theme ensured we used the correct fonts and color scheme, and we found the perfect image of a smartphone by searching our photo library. Thanks to our AI designer, the slide stands out with a generous but balanced use of white space.

Slide 6: Coinbase analogy

An analogy can be a powerful communication tool, and Coinbase employed the literary element in its original pitch deck back in 2012. By comparing its relationship with Bitcoin to iTunes’ relationship with MP3s, Coinbase made a strong statement of its future importance. Anyone instantly knows how iTunes transformed the music industry, and the association clearly implies that Coinbase will have just as much influence on the cryptocurrency sector. We recreated the slide using our Headline slide template, and the background color matches our preselected theme.

Slide 7: User Growth

Potential investors love to hear about the numbers, but numbers on their own can make for one booooring slide deck! We used an infographic to highlight Coinbase’s user growth in an engaging manner. With Beautiful.ai’s Area Chart Smart Slide template, we simply entered the appropriate data and watched as the AI transformed the numbers into an eye-catching yet informative graphic. Thanks to our custom theme, the infographic’s color and fonts were already set to match the rest of the slide deck.

Slide 8: Transactional growth

We finished off our PowerPoint makeover with another infographic, this time illustrating Coinbase’s increasing transactions. Our Line Chart Smart Slide template was perfect to showcase changes over a specific period of time, and our AI designed a perfectly proportioned chart based on the numbers we entered into the template. Had we not selected the line chart, we could have chosen from an assortment of other engaging infographic templates, including bar graphs, pie charts, scattergraphs and Venn diagrams. Each infographic is instantly created by our AI designer as soon as data is entered into the appropriate fields.

How did we do on our PowerPoint makeover? Did we improve the design of the original Coinbase pitch deck, or did you prefer the classic frankendeck? Did the AI make our new design, “beautiful?”