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!
I saw the liberal use of big, high-res images, large-font text, lots of white space, and very little of the old title/bullet/sub-bullet layout. Exactly what I push my clients to do. It was a celebration of the Presentation Zen style I teach. Not a coincidence–the DreamIt leaders have been evangelizing Presentation Zen as long as I have, and everybody in the program had consumed either the book or the DVD.
But they went further than that. The best presentations used dynamic movement to make meaning clear and manage the audience’s attention. Text, images, grapic elements zinged into place, rearranged, grew, shrank, zipped out, building meaning, showing relationships, leading the audience through the story. (Some of the credit goes to the versatility of Keynote–8 out of 10 of these presentations were created on a Mac.)
What floored me most was the total effect of seeing the method in action. It works. Most importantly for BizClarity, it works for investor presentations. It is quite possible to present the complexities of new markets, technologies, and business models in an engaging and visually stunning way that gets investors excited to know more. In ten minutes.
I wasn’t the only person in the audience to see it. Everybody in the crowd was talking afterwards about the great presentations. When was the last time you heard that after a morning full of investor pitches?