Presentations in General
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.)
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 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:
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.)