Haje Jan Kamps

Haje Jan Kamps is mid-stride. At 44, he's running an AI that has read more pitch decks than most VCs ever will - about 3,000 of them, distilled into a tool that gives founders a 37-page report for $15. He's been the journalist sitting across the table, the founder on the other side of it, the VC watching portfolios implode, and the coach whispering line edits at 2am before a partner meeting. Not many people hold all four corners of that table at once.

His Pitch Deck Teardown series at TechCrunch ran for years. He worked through more than 100 real decks from companies that raised anywhere from $125,000 to $500 million. The range was the point. "If you're only raising half a million dollars," he says, "it's crazy to spend $20,000 to raise half a million." The math annoyed him enough to build something about it.

The current vehicle is Pitch Guide - an AI review service trained on that library of thousands of decks, stress-testing them against 250+ criteria. What started as a TechCrunch column became a coaching practice, then a book (Pitch Perfect, Apress 2020), then an AI product. The logic is direct: he saw the same mistakes replicated across thousands of decks from founders who genuinely did not know any better, and he had the data to fix that at scale.

Before pitch decks, there was hardware. Triggertrap - a universal camera trigger - shipped 190,000 units to 90+ countries over seven years. The first Kickstarter hit its goal three times over. The second raised £290,000 and then crashed. Haje wrote about it publicly. The post-mortem became required reading in startup circles, not because failure is rare but because honesty about it is.

He was born in Leiderdorp in the Netherlands, moved to Norway at five, picked up a camera at fourteen. By sixteen or seventeen, he had built digitalkamera.no - a Norwegian digital photography review site. Not a school project. A real website, with real traffic, in the late 1990s when most people were still figuring out what a URL was.

He moved to Liverpool for university - International Journalism at John Moores - swore he'd never become a journalist upon graduating, then immediately became one. Photocritic.org launched in 2002. It became one of the web's most-read photography blogs, the kind of site that showed up in search results before Google had an algorithm worth worrying about.

The viral moment came in 2005. He published a tutorial showing readers how to build a macro lens extension tube from a Pringles can. Slashdot linked it. The traffic crashed his server. The internet, briefly, became very interested in photography.

The hardware years were instructive in the way that expensive mistakes usually are. Triggertrap's first camera trigger worked. The second - Triggertrap Ada - had a chipset that vanished from the market before they could ship. He wrote about what went wrong in a Medium post that founders still pass around. The lesson wasn't about supply chains. It was about honesty: the startup world is better at celebrating wins than explaining losses, and explanations are what everyone actually needs.

After Triggertrap, he joined Bolt VC as Director of Portfolio. Bolt backs hardware startups at pre-seed and seed. He managed a portfolio of around 70 companies. He calls it "industrial-scale startup mentoring" - and that's precisely what he took from it. Patterns. What smart founders do differently. What the deck usually gets wrong. All of it composted into Pitch Guide.

At TechCrunch he built something rare: a series with a mechanical format that readers trusted precisely because of its consistency. Every Pitch Deck Teardown followed the same structure - here's what works, here's what doesn't, here's what a real investor would think reading slide seven. No flattery, no startup boosterism. Just the deck.

Over 100 teardowns. Companies that raised $125K and companies that raised $500M. The range matters because fundraising is not one experience. A pre-seed deck for a solo founder is not the same document as a Series A for a team of thirty. The mistakes overlap more than founders realize, but the context is everything.

His writing doesn't explain why something matters. It shows the detail that proves it. A deck that buries the problem statement on slide four. A market size number that doesn't square with the target customer. A founding team slide that lists titles but gives you no reason to believe these specific humans can do this specific thing. The pattern recognition is what the Pitch Guide AI now does at scale.

Pitch Guide sits at an interesting intersection. It's a product built by someone who has been inside every room the product touches: journalist (reading decks from the outside), founder (writing them from the inside), VC (receiving them, deciding, watching outcomes), and coach (helping fix them before they go out). The AI doesn't just pattern-match against generic "best practices." It patterns against a specific, documented record of what happened when real founders sent real decks to real investors.

The $15 price point is a statement. The market for pitch coaching runs from free YouTube advice to $20,000 consultants. Haje built into the gap where most actual founders live - people raising $500K, maybe $2M, who need sharp feedback but don't have the budget for a boutique advisory firm. The 37-page report covers 250+ criteria. You could spend a day trying to replicate that with ChatGPT and get nowhere close.

The Startup Riders newsletter - his Substack on sub-$20M fundraises - extends the same logic in prose form. Launched in early 2025, it focuses on the unglamorous middle of the fundraising market: pre-seed, seed, and early Series A rounds where the founder is often doing this for the first time and the stakes feel impossibly high.

He speaks English and Norwegian. Has some Dutch, some French, some German, some Spanish. Was born in the Netherlands, grew up Norwegian, lives in Oakland with his wife and what he calls "an assortment of kittens." Was diagnosed with autism and ADHD as an adult - and rather than treating that as a private matter, he hosts a podcast about it. Autistic FM interviews autistic people, their loved ones, and experts. It's part of the same pattern: learn something the hard way, then explain it publicly so others don't have to.

Between 2010 and 2013, while building Photocritic and co-founding hardware companies in London, he was also a volunteer Metropolitan Police Special Constable. He later spent two years as a cat adoption counselor at Friends of Oakland Animal Services. He co-hosts a podcast for the Human Awareness Institute. He is, by his own description, pathologically curious - and the resume confirms it.

The neurodivergent thread connects more than it might seem. His public writing about autism - including a widely-shared piece about Kaiser Permanente's failure to accommodate phone-phobia - comes from the same place as the Triggertrap post-mortem: a preference for accurate accounts over flattering ones. Things went wrong. Here's what actually happened. Here's what it felt like. Here's what other people should know.

He has written more books than most people read in a decade - and they cover a range that reflects his actual career rather than a personal brand. Photography technique, portraiture, macro photography, selfies, travel photography. Then startup fundraising. Then everything in between.

The traditional pitch coaching market has a pyramid problem. At the top: expensive advisors charging $10,000-$20,000 for a polished deck review, accessible only to founders who already have money or connections. At the bottom: free YouTube advice, generic blog posts, templates that don't survive contact with an actual investor.

Pitch Guide sits in the space that mattered most: the founder raising their first $500K who doesn't know what they're doing wrong, can't afford a consultant, and needs honest feedback before the partner meeting. The AI checks decks against 250+ criteria - narrative arc, market sizing methodology, competitive positioning, team credibility signals, financial model coherence - and produces a 37-page report. Actual diagnosis, not cheerleading.

The model works because Haje spent years accumulating the underlying knowledge in public: TechCrunch teardowns, the Pitch Perfect book, the coaching practice. The AI is not a shortcut. It's the same framework, made accessible at a different price point. And a "Ready to Raise in 14 Days" course, 1:1 coaching sessions, and a curated knowledge base round out the offering for founders who want more than the report.

Look across the career and one thing stays constant. Whether he was teaching photography on Photocritic, mentoring hardware founders at Bolt, tearing down pitch decks at TechCrunch, or building an AI that does it at scale - the function is identical: take complicated, high-stakes material, understand it deeply, and explain it clearly to people who need to get it right.

He swore he'd never be a journalist. He swore wrong. The curiosity was always going to go somewhere. It went everywhere: Norwegian internet pioneer at 16, Pringles-can photographer at 24, hardware founder at 30, VC portfolio director at 37, AI builder at 42. The thread isn't the subject matter. It's the teaching.

The Startup Riders newsletter - his current dispatch from the sub-$20M fundraising world - is what he does with that at this moment. Direct, analytical, written for founders who are figuring it out, not founders who already have. Same voice. Different deck.