1996 presentation training

In the bottom of my office drawer I just found a small card with personalised suggestions for better presenting that I had to fill out after a communication training at McKinsey all the way back in 1996. All the usual things are there: stance, eye contact, etc.

But one things stands out and is so 1996/McKinsey: “Introduce the slide before putting it up” (remember we were still in the time of the overhead projector). McKinsey slides were incredibly busy and filled with data, so plopping that overhead sheet on the projector without warning would overwhelm the audience.

Instead, we had to introduce the message of the slide, show it, talk people through the various elements of the slide (what is on the axes, what the line means, etc. etc.), and maybe repeat the key point one more time.

Now 16 years later, my approach has completely changed. When you put up a slide, it should be completely self explanatory, cutting out unnecessary clutter and spreading out content of multiple slides if needed.

From screenshots to use case

How do you showcase your application in a 20 minute pitch? Doing a full, live demo is hardly ever an option:

• Murphy’s Law will strike, and your Internet connection will break down, and if not, another technical issue will hit you
• Some aspects of your app are interesting to show, others are boring and time consuming (loggin in, entering some data, etc.)
• It is hard to stay focussed and on script in a live application, before you know you have lost yourself in an interesting feature and spent far too much time on your demo.

In a short VC pitch, doing a live demo is likely to take the energy and momentum out of our talk. The other solution is showing a bunch of screen shots. But how can we transform a series of uninspiring screen shots into an exciting use case of your product? Some steps to consider:

• Base the whole section on a story. The best stories are real: find an actual customer, disguise everything so it is impossible to expose private information and build the entire screen shot demo on her case.
• Alternate between regular visuals and screen shots. Use a map to show locations, use images taken in the street to give things a sense of place.
• When using screen shots, crop out all the clutter that is irrelevant: operating system window bars, icons, browser navigations and put huge arrows or circles to focus the viewer attention to what you want to see them. Use big text to emphasise what you are doing and why it is so great (“We open an account in just one click”).
• Throughout your story, stay consistent: the same user, the same location, the same issue she is trying to solve.

In this way you got yourself an engaging story that you can use beyond your investor presentation, it could be the corner stone of a customer presentation or even a web site slider. You can still bring the actual demo along, but use it only to point at it as proof that you have a working product. If the investor is interested, you can invite her for an in-depth, and longer meeting later.

Which color schemes work?

You cannot argue about taste, and there are no rules about what color combinations work or not. But somehow there are color schemes that come out great in a presentation, and with certain ones I have a very hard time making a deck look good. Here are my random experiences:

• Colour schemes with fewer contrasting colours in it tend to work better. You can create beautiful minimalist shades with grey shades and black, with a dash of a bright accent color here and there. In case of three (or more) contrasting colours, I tend to pick one of the three as my main accent color, and reduce the prominence of the other 2
• Deep colours work better than faded pastel ones. What looks great in print, might not work on a screen. Especially when you make the backgrounds of your slides white. Contradicting my first point, a series of deep colours can look great of they are related, and not contrasting. I have designed great looking decks with 5 to 7 related colours.

So, whenever you are thinking about new colours for your company, create a few presentation slides to evaluate options rather than deciding on the look of a logo. Logo colours can look great, but seeing them used in a business presentation is another challenge.

If you are going to work mainly with dark backgrounds, use that as your color testing ground. And vice-versa, if you find that your colours simply do not look good on white, switch to dark background presentations. I have applied this rescue trick a few times with clients.

Bullet points can be OK

Some readers of my blog have become paranoid to use bullet points in a presentation (a good thing), but there are actually situations where putting 3 short sentences on a page is inevitable, or even a good solution for a slide.

These situations are when you want to express that something has a number of components. Breaking up those 3 advantages and give them one slide each enables you to explain them clearly individually, but the audience loses the overall perspective of how they are related.

In those cases - yes, it happens to the best - I revert to 3 short bullets.  But there are a few things you can do to keep things interesting:

• A massive visual anchor (like a big 1, 2, and 3) to show that you are talking about an overview slide
• Really, really short descriptions just to introduce the ideas. The full explanations come in subsequent charts
• Also, you can deviate from the traditional list and come up with other geometrical shapes ore layouts to make your three (short) points.

How to get started?

I recently answered a Quora question on what is the best way to get started with a VC/investor presentation. The answer applies to all presentations, not just investor presentations. Obviously, this is my preferred approach, yours might be different.

I use multiple approaches at the same time, in parallel:

• Scribble a story line on paper, or an iPad mind mapping app (iThoughtsHD is good)

• (Just because I like it) design a really beautiful cover page with a nice image and the right look and feel of the deck.

• Dive straight in and try to craft that ultimate killer slide, the one that makes the most important point in your presentation and finish it all the way. BANG.

Then I continue to iterate: refining the story line, adding a chart here and there. I take lots of breaks in the entire process, designing a good deck can take a lapse time of about 2 weeks. This ensures that your creative energy stays fresh. Presentations made at gun point at 3AM before the 9AM meeting never look really good.

Speaking in Barcelona

I will be crossing the Mediterranean Sea and talking about designing a good VC/investor pitch presentation in Barcelona. It would be great to shake hands with readers in Spain.



The event is scheduled for October 3, at 19:00. The location still has to be finalised, maybe the campus of the IESE business school, or another central Barcelona location. The presentation will be in English, and is free of charge. You can sign up for the event here.

Thank you Conor Neill for connecting me to the Barcelona startup community. Thank you John  and Mel Kots for this nice and hazy picture of Gaudi’s master piece that is still under construction.

Lots of layers

Here is a concept to label lots of layers in a circle without bending text, the second image shows with which components the first chart was created.

Your presentation objective?

To many, this might sound as an obvious question. “Hey, this deck is here to get my idea funded!” While this might be the ultimate goal of your presentation, it is usual to break down the process in its individual steps.

The objective of a short elevator-pitch-like-chat or coffee discussion is not to receive the investment, it is to get to the next meeting. And reaching that next stage involves intriguing your audience enough, maybe leaving out some of the tedious detail, while not forgetting to completely  nail that big elephant-in-the-room-issue (even if it means going into excruciating detail).

Page numbers?

Big graphical elements that are repeating on every page obstruct your slide design. Examples are legal disclaimers, company logos, banners, and yes: page numbers. I am not a purist here, and will most of the time put a tiny page number in light grey at the top right of the page. Too small for a keynote audience to see, but big enough to guide a page switch in a phone conversation.

Taking off the polish...

Venture capitalist Roelof Botha argues that startups should take off the polish when pitching him:

MB: What puts you off when looking at a startup for possible investment?
RB: Unnecessary hyperbole and polish — I much prefer raw authenticity

At first reading, this might suggest to save yourself some time and stop investing in your investor presentation. But I think the opposite is true: good presentation design is actually all about taking off the polish and bringing the raw story out, rather than shining everything up.

Slides with bullet points in fluffy language full of buzz words are polished. Minimalistic, beautifully designed visuals are raw. And this applies to all types of presentations, not just investor pitches.

Excel on the front page

It is shocking to see that pre-election poll results on the cover of a large Dutch newspaper are presented in a plain standard Excel template and colours with one adjustment: add some 3D effects, which makes it even worse.

Pop out of the box

If you have a person or an object standing in front of a background, make it pop out a bit: increase the size, and fade the background.

Connecting to the audience

That was quite a speech by Michelle Obama at the Democratic Convention. Political objectives translated into human story telling. Call it the inverse strategy, rather than attacking your opponent directly and saying that he measures achievement only in terms of dollars, and will never be able to understand the hardship many Americans go through because he has never experienced it himself, portray your own situation as the exact opposite. Make all the accusations implicitly



Short sentences (fits in 140 characters), natural language, no buzzwords, lots and lots of real-life stories. You see the people in the audience completely glued to the stage, hearing what they wanted to hear.

The deck is not always the issue

Some stories are really good but complicated to explain. Here, a well-designed slide deck can make a big impact.

Other stories are relatively easy to explain, but have a few big questions inside them. In these cases, effort is better spent on providing answers to the questions, rather than investing it in making the slide deck look and flow better.

If you have limited resources, choose where you are.

Let me introduce her to you

Team bio slides in presentation often resemble a C.V.: lots of information, lots of buzzwords, lots of academic degrees from 30 years ago. All team bio slides look the same.

At a cocktail party, people use a different approach to introducing someone. Out comes a very quick, personal, and memorable description of a person. Every cocktail party introduction is different.

Try designing your team bio slide more like a cocktail party introduction, and less like a C.V. page.

Actually, add the full detail of the C.V. in font 10 as backup reading material at the end of your presentation, for reading, not presenting.

Trackpad U-turn: back to the mouse

With the advent of Mac OSX Lion I moved to using a track pad for all those fancy swiping features. However, I am back to a regular mouse. For intensive design work, a track pad strains my wrist too much. You constantly need to lift your hand slightly above the track pad, which starts to hurt. Using a mouse, I can put my hand and wrist in a completely neutral position without straining any muscle.

It does not have to be pretty

You have limited time, you have limited budget, and you are not a natural-born designer. Still you can design an effective presentation. Keep it minimal and tasteful.

1. No bullet points
2. One big idea per slide
3. Use simple shapes without a border
4. Muted color palette (lots of greys, one bright accent color) without gradients
5. Non-cheesy stock images: high res and in correct aspect ratio
6. Arial font
7. White page, (small logo if you want at the bottom right)

People will recognise it was not designed by a professional, but they will get the message and respect you how you did this with such minimal tools.

Beyond perfection

I recently watched this video: The making of Aja, an album by Steely Dan released in the early 1970s. The movie shows how the bands 2 creative leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker going track by track, instrument by instrument, to get the album “beyond perfection”, as one of the studio musicians describes the process about halfway in the video.

Fagen and Becker were ruthless perfectionists, editing down guitar solos of the best players down to a few notes, swapping entire bands overnight, or adding a few high (1970s) synthesizer notes to make a flute sound a bit fuller.

Only when you get to a point that is beyond perfection can you start to improvise to give things that personal edge. And that is exactly the same for presentations: only when you have rehearsed in and out, you can deliver that truly relaxed and spontaneous presentation.

The movie is on Netflix, but to my surprise I also found a lower-quality version free online, the site seems legitimate:


Watch Classic Albums - Steely Dan - Aja in Music  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

But we are a serious company!

I get that question often when presenting my deck loaded with impressionist paintings to a big corporate. Serious companies cannot make presentations like these.

Wrong. Visual presentations without bullet points can be highly professional, and highly serious. Just take a different theme than impressionist paintings.

Right. I do agree that being serious adds a design challenge. Everyone can Google image search a bunch of funny page-filling images together and add some outrageously big wacky fonts to them and call it a visual presentation.  The challenge is to add some aesthetics, but it is an easy step to make once you have made the big leap of leaving bullet points behind.

Story prioritization

Some startups have a technology platform that can be used in multiple markets, and often the startup is not completely clear (yet) about how to prioritise them. In a first 20-minute investor pitch this creates a highly confusing story; an investor can only take in so much information in 20 minutes and probably will not buy that a 5 person startup can conquer all these markets (she is probably right). Here is a potential solution:

In the first 20 minute cold pitch:

• Set up your platform business situation
• Pitch 1 (maybe 2) markets properly (the most promising ones)
• Hint at further upside in the other markets (1 quick slide)

If that went well, elaborate more in follow-on meetings about the other opportunities and provide a discussion framework about possible prioritisation, and you can even ask the potential investor for advice.

Do not try to spring all 10 stories in the first 20 minutes, you will fail.