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In the course of looking for something else in the blogosphere, I came across the writings of Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur and professor at the Stanford Business School. (He has a blog, and lots of his videos, podcasts, and articles are all over the Internet. All good stuff.)
Prof. Blank is known for fresh thinking and new ideas on entrepreneurship that are firmly grounded in his real-world experience founding and running and investing in venture start-ups. He has self-published a book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, that reportedly is as hard to read as it is revolutionary.
My plan was to get the book, read it, and then tell you about it. But this morning I twice found myself describing some of the ideas to CEO’s I was talking to. So I decided not to wait.
The fastest way to give you a taste for these ideas is to quote a big chunk of a blog post by Eric Reis on this blog Lessons Learned. All that follows is a shameless cut-and-paste from Eric’s post. The exact post is here. Thanks Eric.
There’s so much crammed into The Four Steps to the Epiphany that I want to distill out what I see as the key points:
- Get out of the building. Very few startups fail for lack of technology. They almost always fail for lack of customers. Yet surprisingly few companies take the basic step of attempting to learn about their customers (or potential customers) until it is too late. I’ve been guilty of this many times in my career – it’s just so easy to focus on product and technology instead. True, there are the rare products that have literally no market risk; they are all about technology risk (”cure for cancer”). For the rest of us, we need to get some facts to inform and qualify our hypotheses (”fancy word for guesses”) about what kind of product customers will ultimately buy.And this is where we find Steve’s maxim that “In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Most likely, your business plan is loaded with opinions and guesses, sprinkled with a dash of vision and hope. Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you don’t have to give up on your dream. We just want you to get out of the building, and start finding out whether your dream is a vision or a delusion. Surprisingly early, you can start to get a sense for who the customer of your product might be, how you’ll reach them, and what they will ultimately need. Customer development is emphatically not an excuse to slow down or change the plan every day. It’s an attempt to minimize the risk of total failure by checking your theories against reality.
- Read more
Too busy to read much? Look here.
A slide show.
How to use photos. How to use large text. Maybe you don’t go to this extreme. But here’s what hip people on the west coast are doing with slides.
(For more info on this style, see the Presentation Zen post, below.)
Everything you do or say during a presentation has an effect on the audience. Nothing can be taken for granted. Starting with the TITLE SLIDE.
If your title slide is uninviting, amateur-looking, or cheesy, your presentation is going downhill even before you open your mouth.
Yum! Can't wait to sit through this one.
What's that crap at the top? Who is the presenter? What pre-schooler did the logo?
There’s really no excuse for a bad title slide. Because a good title slide is easy to do, a no-brainer, if you know a few basic rules.
Safe-Harbor Title Slide Design
Here are some basic, no-fault rules for a clean, serviceable title slide. With examples.
I found this slide deck while surfing SlideShare. It from North Venture Partners from Oakland, California, a firm with progressive ideas for helping entrepreneurs. Clearly this is a group that has seen a lot of start-ups fail and out of frustration are driven to prevent more companies from making the same mistakes.
All the points made in this deck ring true. Some of the “fails” have to do generally with getting your company venture ready. Some are direct hits on what to say and do–or NOT say or do–in an investor pitch.
The slides all use full-screen photographs. But the text obscures half of the photograph in each slide. So for that reason, don’t copy this style exactly as a model for your slides.
However, my guess is what you see here is a presentation deck that has been modified to work as a stand-alone deck on SlideShare and embedded in blogs (like BizClarity). It is a model to be emulated if you imagine the slides without the blocks of text, with only the “Fail,” “Fix” graphics and headlines positioned in a dead portion of each photo, and with the text delivered as a spoken narrative.
The photos themselves are a good example of how to do photo selection right. The photo in each case expands on the meaning of the slide, and adds humor or drama without being coy or cliched.
Photo selection is never as easy as it looks. It takes time, good hunting skills, and lots of trial and error. But when you find just the right photo, you know it. It pops off the screen, gets a chuckle from the audience, and gives a palpable boost to your narrative. (That said, there are a couple photos in this deck I don’t think work well. Can you guess which ones?)
If you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while, you’ve seen me refer to Presentation Zen more than once? What is Presentation Zen?
Presentation Zen is a book.
When I discovered this book last year, it changed the way I do and teach presentations. If you’re still among the millions who think that any respectable business presentation has to have slides of mostly text organized into bullets and sub-bullets, get the book. Spending just a few minutes leafing through the examples in Presentation Zen is the first step on the long journey to presentation satori.
The author, Garr Reynolds, is a product of Silicon Valley but now lives and works in Japan. Thus the “zen” part of his approach is somewhat authentic.
Presentation Zen is a DVD.
True story. I was invited to help coach the presentations of the ten companies incubated at DreamIt Ventures this summer. I hadn’t done the initial coaching of the presentations, so they were pretty far along before I joined the process.
I was blown away at what I saw. After the first few, I exclaimed to the group, “What’s going on here? These are great, visual presentations–exactly the style I teach! Who taught you to do this?”
What’s a wordle?
It’s a word cloud. Word clouds–called tag clouds if they include links–are common in the Web 2.0 universe. But a wordle is a special case, one created by the software at Wordle.net (NOT .com or .org). To my eye, wordles have class. They are intriguing. They look good.
At wordle.net, all you have to do is paste a text document into a field on the website, and out the other comes a tag cloud. Then you can play with a host of different font and color schemes, including greyscale for black and white documents, and a variety of layouts, from architectonic to crazy. Lots of fun. Easy, quick addition to a presentation, or document where you want to call attention to the content to follow.
Warning: could be a time suck. Once you start playing with it you’ll want to wordlize everything you can think of.
Here’s the wordle I created from the entire, 25 page document of presentation guidelines I use with my clients.
Wordle of "How to Talk to Money" by Steve Bowman
Here’s one of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”
Wordle of "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones (Jagger/Richards)
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Wordle of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And stay away from the “randomize” button! wordle.net
I work closely with a lot of entrepreneurs and I’m often asked my opinion of the various venture fairs in the area. The question is urgently important when they need capital to keep their company growing and alive. They are reluctant to invest time and money into an event that doesn’t give them a good chance to connect with serious investors. They hear rumors that some are great, worth every penny, and some suck, stay away.
I’ve been to lots of venture fairs, I help plan and run a few, and I have my opinions and biases. But my purview is limited. I’m sure it would be much more useful to the entrepreneur community to collect opinions and reports from a statistically significant number of people who have experienced a range of venture fairs.
That’s what this post is about. I’m hoping that you will add comments about individual venture fairs, and venture fairs in general. As we get a certain critical mass of comments, I’ll break it up into separate event-specific posts.
I’m inviting comments from entrepreneurs, investors, event sponsors, service providers, and event organizers.
So have at it. Share anything you want. I only ask that your comments be objective and fair. What’s good, what’s bad? What works, what doesn’t? What is it about venture fairs you would like to see ridiculed and banned, and what should be praised and imitated?
I know what the ultimate, modern-day slide presentation should look like. I can visualize it, and I’ve seen it done successfully in investor presentations. Rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space. I push the book Presentation Zen on everybody I meet because it evangelizes the promised land of rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space.
But when I’m working with a client and time is short, it’s unrealistic to expect somebody who’s been thoroughly inculcated in what I call the “old school” text-heavy style to make radical changes overnight. So I’ve developed a list of short cuts , a few easy steps for making slides more visual and readable that can be applied to an existing presentation literally overnight. These aren’t the ultimate solution, but they yield the highest return-on-effort for a time-crunched entrepreneur.
Here is the BizClarity Cure for Clutter:
I’m from Philadelphia and to us Philadelphians the little town of Pittsburgh, if we think about it at all, is an afterthought, a city somewhere west in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Where the Pittsburgh Pirates used to terrorize the Philadelphia Phillies. And something about steel and glass and Andy Warhol.
Andy Grew Up in Pittsburgh. They named a bridge after him.
But there’s something remarkable happening in Pittsburgh and the entire east-coast venture community would do well to take notice. 3 Rivers Venture Fair is putting Pittsburgh on the map (oh, and so is the G-20 Summit, but that’s no big deal).
I’ve been coaching companies for the 3 Rivers Venture Fair (”3RVF”) since early July, sponsored by my pals at the law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius. Of all of the venture fairs I’ve coached for, this is the strongest batch of companies I’ve seen. Every one is solid. Big markets, strong teams, many with significant revenue, differentiated technology. Usually when I work with a whole batch of companies at least a couple are clearly duds. Not this batch.
Financial projections are, on the surface, a futile exercise. Nobody believes them. Studies prove that 98% of actual business results of start-up companies are less than projected and take twice the time, compared to the projections in the business plans. Yet investors insist on seeing them, and complain if you leave them out of your presentation. Why?
Because financial projections serve two functions.
A ten-minute pitch used at venture fairs and first meetings with investors should (almost) always include financial projections.
But most entrepreneurs do them wrong.
Any type of graph is useless. Use a table. Investors are numbers people who are most comfortable with real numbers. Save graphs for data sets of greater than 30 numbers.
THIS IS UPPER CASE.
this is lower case.
This is sentence case.
This Is Title Case.
Title case is for titles, not for bullets. When I see title case in bullets and sub-bullets, I cringe. This may seem like a minor point, but it’s not. Title case used incorrectly makes your slides hard to read, confusing, and makes you look like an amateur. Luckily, it’s a very easy mistake to fix so we can all move on to the bigger issues of presenting your business story.
Title Case Is Hard to Read for Anything More Than a Short Title Because When People Read Their Eyes Scan the Shapes of Words and Too Much Capitalization is Hard to Scan.
Title case can also cause confusion because proper nouns, as we all learned in grammar school, are capitalized to make them stand out from common nouns. Proper nouns get lost in the upper-case tangle, forcing the audience to work harder to puzzle out your meaning and distracting them from your narrative flow.
Here’s an example slide from an actual presentation, untouched. The author applies title case at random, compounding the confusion.
I attended DreamIt Ventures Demo Day last week in Philadelphia. Even though I had contributed some to coaching the company presentations, seeing it all come together in a formal event just blew me away.
DreamIt is one of those new programs, like TechStars and LaunchBox, that are a combination of business incubator + fast-track MBA + summer camp. 10 companies were selected from 300 applicants for the opportunity to spend the summer together at the DreamIt incubator in West Philadelphia, receive mentoring from a long list of experts, and then pitch to the venture community. They got some seed funding too as part of the deal. All the companies were developing a web-based product or service. All the entrepreneurs were either young 20-somethings, or young at heart.
I saw 10 exciting companies who stretched my idea of what is possible to do on the web. I saw the usually staid Philadelphia venture crowd eat it up. I heard about at least one exit from this batch of 10, and buzz about impending funding for some others. A remarkable track record already.
But what really floored me was the presentations. I saw the future. And the future is visually stunning!
10 things to know before you pitch a VC for Money
David Rose is a serial entrepreneur and serial investor, a leader in the New York City angel network, and the founder of AngelSoft, the de facto standard software system for angel groups all across the country. In this 18-minute talk at TED in 2008 David lays down the law for how to pitch to investors.
David is not a shy person, and he talks real fast (this is only a little faster than his normal speaking voice). But he knows what he’s talking about. This is a high-powered version of the things I hear investors say all the time. I agree with (almost) everything he says.
The only problem is that in 18 minutes he can outline only the high principles, the big-concept do’s and don’t’s. He says very little about the nuts and bolts of how to build a presentation that would meet his high standards. It all sounds good but, you ask, “now what do I do?” Well, that’s what BizClarity is here for. In my coaching, workshops, and writings, I turn investor imperatives, like those David lists here, into practical advice.
But I’m no match for his authority and intensity. Take a look:
(If you have trouble viewing this here, you can go directly to the YouTube page by clicking here.)
It happens alot. I’m working with a new client, seeing their presentation for the first time. And it’s terrible. I see one ridiculously crammed slide after another, small fonts, tiny images. When I point out the problem and launch into my spiel about the advantages of putting less on each slide, the entrepreneur exclaims, “But how else can I get everything on 10 slides! You know, the ten-slide rule!”
The ten-slide rule strikes again!
The ten-slide rule causes more agony, pain, and awful presentations then almost any other single idea. To be fair, this little simple-minded rule is a part of a bigger wrong idea: that the number of slides has anything to do with the quality or cogency of a presentation.
The ten-slide rule is an old idea, originating in the ’80’s and more recently perpetuated by Guy Kawasaki in his best-selling book for entrepreneurs, The Art of the Start (which I recommend, mostly). I don’t disagree with Guy’s motivation–he’s fed up with long, cluttered, boring presentations. He laid down the law to coax CEO’s of start-up companies to cut their presentations down to size.
The problem is, any rule that limits the number of slides assumes that all slides are equally dense with content. It made sense ten years ago when all presentations were text slides in the title/bullet/sub-bullet format. When investors count slides what they’re really saying is: “Don’t show us more than ten slides dense with impossible to read, confusing crap so we can cut your presentation short and get on with the meeting.”
Here’s the truth: the number of slides in a presentation is irrelevant! It doesn’t matter one dit if you have 10, 20, 50 or 100 slides in your presentation. What does matter is how well the slides support your narrative. And the pace of your ideas. How long you speak and the level of detail.
Here’s something I hadn’t heard before: four handy metaphors for answering the questions, “why go to the trouble of getting a patent?” I found it in a compact and loaded two-page PDF offered by Morgan Lewis on their Entrepreneur Resources website called “Sieve or Safe–How Solid is Your IP?”. You’ll see it here. (There’s a lot packed into this PDF; I’ll be expanding on some of the more interesting ideas in future posts.) The full Morgan Lewis resource site is linked in the right column of this blog page, under Law Links.
From the section on patents:
“WHY SEEK A PATENT?
• “Sword”
− Sue anyone with same or equivalent invention
• “Shield”
− Helps to defend against a patent infringement suit
• “Trading Chip”
− Trade technology rights with other patent owners
• “Walk the Walk”
− Additional credibility for investors”
I’ve worked with a lot of tech companies who own patents (or are investing a lot of time and money to get some). But most are focused on only the first reason–the Sword. It’s true that being able to protect your technology from being copied and stolen is important. The “Shield” idea points up the other side of patent value–to prevent other companies from going after you to stop what you’re doing. “Trading chip” is even more exotic, but I have seen it happen, especially with complex technologies that have many dimensions. You might compare it to “seizing higher ground,” to use another battle analogy.
For laughs only. I heard about this from Andy Sernovitz, the only guy who says “this has got to be the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
If you don’t know who Ali G is, this bit is a total put on. He’s an actor–the guy who did the movie Borat a couple years ago, and is currently posing as Bruno. The other people in the video, including Donald Trump, don’t know it’s a put on.
For a serious discussion of lessons embedded in Ali G’s charade, check out the O’Reilley blog post, Is Your Prodcut an Ice-Cream Glove or a Snuggie. If you’re in the mood for more reading, follow the links in that post for “lean startups” and “customer development” and anything by Stanford professor Steve Blank–new ideas coming from entrepreneur thought leaders. I’ll blog about these ideas myself at some point.