Man, YES. I had almost the exact same thing happen after a local DC group meetup last spring. The guy did a live smish demo on his own phone, screen mirrored, and had half the room wincing in like two minutes because he used a real fake delivery text and walked through exactly which link gave him the creds. Our deck at the time had this huge lead-in about our "platform" before we ever showed a payload, and our AE fought me HARD when I said we were cutting it. She was sure buyers needed the whole story first. We compromised on a 3 slide setup and then straight into a live phish, and the very first call after that, the guy stopped us mid walkthrough and said "can you back up, I want to see the header again." Nobody ever asked to see a header during a slide. That was the moment I knew.

Ah yes, the classic "one bad sentence kills the whole deal" theory, right up there with "we lost the account because our logo was the wrong shade of blue." Been to enough of these mixers to know the real reason half those founders got no follow up is that they were boring, unprepared, or both. The framing thing might be a cute scapegoat but the guy who nailed his intro still probably went home with nothing but a lanyard and a warm sparkling water. At some point you gotta admit the room was never really about pitches in the first place.