Sequoia's 56 page PowerPoint deck of doom

Posted on TechCrunch today. A presentation of VC firm Sequoia to portfolio companies. You can click through it in a few minutes. From a presentation design perspective, not great (i.e., not all slides are perfectly designed with many bullet points, but what do you do if you have to put something together quickly), but not completely bad either. The content is slightly depressing though for startups trying to raise money (many of my clients). CEO_ALL_HANDS_10-7-08_FINAL - Free Legal Forms UPDATE: someone making fun of this presentation here.

Making dense financial accounting data readable in PowerPoint

With a few tricks you incorporate even the most dense financial accounting data in your PowerPoint presentation. Obviously, these are not the slides for your big idea. Still, you sometimes cannot omit them. For example, VC s would like to see some financials even in a 25 minute pitch deck.

• Round numbers
• Sligthly different tints/shades of your color scheme to highlight columns
• No $ signs inside the data
• Right-align row labels and numbers
• Avoid abbreviations as much as you can

Click image for a large picture.

Financial crisis - at least there are opportunities for data visualization...

The current financial crisis is a "gold mine" for data visualization. Below is a heatmap taken from a recent IMF report on the world's financial (in)stability. The chart shows how the troubles have spread from subprime mortgages to other asset classes over the course of 2007 and 2008. Many more data visualization examples related to the financial crisis can be found on Paul Kedrosky's "Infectious Greed" blog. I discussed a financial crisis primer in PowerPoint earlier here. More on heatmaps here and here.

UPDATED - VC pitch advice/templates available on the web

I updated an earlier post with VC pitch templates available on the web:

• The TechCrunch pitch guidelines, and Jason Calacanis' recommendations on how to "demo your startup", part two is here.
• VC funding for geeks by Mark Hedlund
• Top 10 VC objections posted on Altgate, here a link to Altgate's popular posts.
• Alliance of Angeles presentation guidelines, and downloadable template, the structure of this template is OK, the graphical execution is not
• Advice by David. S. Rose
• Brad Feld on the Torturous world of PowerPoint
• Guy Kawasaki's the art of pitching, "How to pick up a VC", and "The no-bullshiitake-investor-wishlist".
• Bill Reichert on an entrepreneur's 2007 New Year's resolution: I will fix my pitch
• Genisis Partners' (Israeli VC) pitch presentation template
• The Extreme Presentation Method's interview with VCs: part 1 and part 2
• How not to write a business plan by David Cowan
• Steve Jobs in a video from the 90s going analogue to explain the distinctiveness of NeXT.
• Expert tips on pitching on pitching a winner by Alyssa Royse
• What not to wear: 5 cring-worthy phrases in investor pitches by Rebecca Lovell
• Why startup pitches fail by Eric Ries.
• Paul Graham on fund raising, link collection by Eric Ries

Financial crisis explained in PowerPoint

A post on The Big Picture in February 2008 points to a "cartoonesk" PowerPoint presentation explaining the current crisis in the financial markets. We all should have listened to it...  There is no credit though for who created this file, also some explicit 4-letter words inside. (UPDATE, in slideshare an author is mentioned, not sure whether the person who uploaded it also created it)

Subprime Primer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: subprime mortgages)

For those who want to know it all in detail in a classic presentation packed with dense facts, I embed another presentation. It is not written in Presentation Zen-style, but most of the data charts are designed correctly. Viewing in full-screen mode is essential.

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: kedrosky milken)

Update: Presentation Zen adds another explanation video here.

Seth Godin on PowerPoint magic

See his post here. I agree with all his suggestions, except for the one where he recommends to buy your own font. It might look great, but creates an incredible headache when sharing documents with others, or putting things on the web.

Slides that stick - now included in Alltop Speaking

Alltop is a "magazine rack" of high-quality, popular topics. I am proud to say that this blog has been included in the "Speaking" section. Go check it this page, since it includes feeds from many other interesting blogs in the area of presentation design and public speaking.

Goldmail - rich presentations in email

TechCrunch writes about Goldmail today: tool that allows you to create Flash animation of a media-rich presentation (including voice-over) that can be embedded easily in an email.

UPDATE: Please read the elaborate clarification by Tom Holownia, VP Marketing of GoldMail, in the comments.

What do consultants mean when they say "you're not MEESEE?"

MECE (pronounced "meesee") stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Management consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc.) use it a lot. What does it mean? In simple language, a text is MECE where are no holes, no overlaps. For example, the following structure is not MECE:

• Prices ....
• Volume .....
• Revenues ....

Revenues is the result of prices x volume, there is an overlap in this list. Why does being MECE matter? If you want to analyze a problem, it is important that you get all the component structure of the problem right: you need to get them all on the radar screen, and there should not be any dependency between the components. For example if you concluded that "costs are not the issue" and close the analysis here, you don't want it to re-emerge somewhere else in your problem solving effort. Why does being MECE matter in PowerPoint presentations? If you want to tell the audience a story  you don't want to confuse them by bringing up points again in an unclear structure. The logic should be clear. Should you apply it blindly in your PowerPoint presentations? No. MECE stories can have the perfect logical structure, but can also be boring. For example, in order to be complete, you need to address the rest of the world aftering discussing the most exciting markets US and Asia, even when they are not relevant. Be MECE when designing a story line structure, then adjust to make your presentation interesting and compelling.

Free Cisco network icon library for PowerPoint

When helping startups to pitch for VCs, I often need to include a slide with a technical architecture in a presentation. These diagrams are complex to make. Cisco makes life a little bit easier by putting its entire icon set as a free download online (link). They are ready to be copied directly into PowerPoint. The images are not that pretty, but they are functional. A smart move by Cisco, many potential clients will use these icons to design their network requirements before entering the vendor selection process P.S. Technical diagrams that use these type of icons often end up in a handout, or the appendix section of a presentation. I will post my thoughts about technical architectures that need to play a central role in a pitch presentation later.

Pimp my poster - scientific conference billboards

I stumbled across this article in The Scientist today: life sciences scientist discussing posters that are used to present work in scientific conferences. It is worth a read, presentation design discussed from another angle. Also have a look in some of the links in the side bar with more related content. (Don't click around too much as after trying to access too many pages the site requires subscription). Some points that are made (some more serious than others):

• PowerPoint has killed the scientific conference poster, the program is not build for it, but people do not want to spend a lot of money on huge trial prints that in the end are not good
• Color-coordinating the clothing of the presenter with those of the presenter (scientifically proven) improves communcation effectiveness
• There is a bigger debate on the "death of the scientific paper" with ever increasing data sets and new presentation technologies available

(Image source on Flickr) The article does not provide a hot link to the Flickr group "Pimp my poster", you can find it here. I randomly clicked through some posters, here is an interesting one as an example of the sort of presentations scientists are preparing. I learned about a new set of communication challenges today.

Showing off your customers - building a logo page in PowerPoint (or something different)

Many of the startup clients I serve are keen to show off their customer list. Almost all of them do it using a page full of company logos scraped of web pages. Why do most of them look so bad?

• Different sizes
• Different colors
• Not evenly distributed over the page
• Not all images are of high quality

Some guide lines on how to let them look better, some of which are easy, some of which take more time:

1. Build a grid. Count the number of logos you need to put up. Build a nicely distributed x by y matrix of rectangular boxes that fits them all. Now all logos will look evenly spread.
2. Use a white background, or make at least the boxes (described above in 1.) white, most logos come on white
3. Use the "press toolkit" of a company to download the official logo
4. If not available, use Google Image search to find clean logos (not the ones with background graphics at the top loft corner of web pages), the bigger the size, the better (they look sharper when you shrink them)
5. If the logo is only available with a colored background, find the RGB color of it (in Paint, or another graphics program) and make the color of the box (described in 1.) exactly the same
6. Crop out any marketing slogans ("we try harder") etc. from the logo
7. To make the slide a bit more calm, you can take the color out of all the logos and replace them with a monochrome overlay consistent with your slide color scheme. The point is to show lots of logos, not neccesarily introduce a lot of colors to your slide.

Image credit: Stabilo Boss' web 2.0 logo page on Flickr. About the something different. Bigger companies can use another concept, describing where their products are used at any moment in time. Microsoft for example, could put an image of a busy Paris boulevard and put small arrows with a Microsoft logo inside and point it at stores, cafes, offices, someone talking into a mobile phone, etc. All to indicate that the company has millions of customers in all possible consumer and business segments.

Google images now with "photo-only" option

In the advanced search tab of Google Images you can now specify: all content, news content, faces, and photo content. Photo content is the new addition. You can strip put illustratations, logos etc. from your image search. (Thank you Lifehacker.) Although I purchase all my PowerPoint images from stock photography sites, I often use Google images to "brainstorm" a concept for an image. Off topic. The "faces" option might be the most interesting. We are heading for a world where images of people are getting automatically tagged, that means: all images available on the web. For fun, see MyHeritage that has developed technology to match your face with that of a celebrity. My face was matched to that of Formula I racer Alain Prost. I guess their technology will be put to more serious use soon.

Classic mis-communication cartoon

I like using comic cartoons in my presentations. This one is a classic about mis-communication in a (software development?) project. It can work well in presentations during corporate retreats. With a little creative cutting and pasting you can make an attractive slide sequence.

The (small) text under each image (click the image for a larger picture):

1. How the customer explained it
2. How the project leader understood it
3. How the analyst designed it
4. How the programmer wrote it
5. How the business consultant described it
6. How the project was documented
7. What operations installed
8. How the customer was billed
9. How it was supported
10. What the customer really needed

The Project Cartoon site has more variations and larger downloads of the cartoon. It is still not clear to me who owns the original copyright on this image.

I posted before about "serious" cartoons in presentations here.

Using real faces in PPT (+ Microsoft AutoCollage)

I like using images of people in my PowerPoint presentations.

• Faces create an emotional connection (especially on a title page that is open for a long time on the screen while the audience sits down)
• Faces allow the visualization of a consumer segment, an image says more than a 1,000 words (college education, mid-income, Hispanic, woman, suburbia, etc.)

Things to think about when picking images:

• Select images of "real people", not "artificial" models, cliche images, or cheesy compositions of which there 1,000s on stock image sites (hand shakes, applause, "business person in suit", call centre rep, etc.)
• Images isolated on a white (or black) background often blend in most easily into your template
• Often, I use a color overlay to take the natural image colors out and replace it with a color from my client's color scheme.

I used a free trial of Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008 to show some examples of images of "real people" I used (click on the image for a larger picture). All images were purchased from iStockPhoto.

(B.t.w., why is Microsoft trying to sell this product with many free collage utilities available on the web?)

Chart concept - hand-written notes

A hand writing style can often be useful in slides describing inputs for product design, or a time line with milestones / todo lists (the latter always runs the risk of looking particularly boring). This slide was created using a stock image of mm-paper plus the standard PPT "sticky note" shape with a shading put in the back. The font is "Kristen" but it can be any informal looking one.

Presenter view - your screen's different from the audience's

PowerPoint has a smart little-known feature built in: presenter view. The screen on your laptop is different from the full-screen view the audience sees.

1. Slide count
2. Current slide
3. Notes
4. One slide back
5. Marker
6. Opens a menu (black screen, white screen, other functions)
7. Next slide
8. Presentation timer
9. Slide sequence

In order for it to work, you need to setup your computer for 2 monitors (The primary monitor is your laptop, the second one the big projector) in windows control panel/display properties. After that, in the PowerPoint slideshow menu, set up slide show and go to the multiple monitors section.

UPDATE: From the comments below, John Goalby is pointing to his very detailed, free ebook on the subject of Presenter View.

David S. Rose: 10 things to know before you pitch a VC for money

Presentation Zen posted a good review about the presentation aspects of David Rose's TED video about pitching your company to VCs. I watched the video, and would like to add a summary of some of the content that David is talking about.

• It's all about you. The content of the presentation is about the substance of your business. But VCs look for things you are not directly presenting, but convey in between the lines about yourself.
• Integrity, realism, coachable were 3 characterization that stood out from the 10 or so "you" criteria David was listing (including more obvious ones such as passion, knowledge, etc.). Be a person that stands with both feet on the ground and is open to learn.

After discussing "you", David moves on to discuss a structure of a pitch presentation. Many elements are not new (market, team, financials, etc. see video for details), but he adds useful thoughts to all of them (I use the words "don't" alot):

• Start immediately with a very, very brief description of what you actually do, so the audience is not guessing through your talk but rather can focus on the content
• Don't "pop" the buildup of excitement by going back, making a mistake, stalling. 
• Don't say anything that is not true (linked to the integrity point) above. (My addition, say "I don't know" if you're not sure)
• Don't make the audience think/wonder about number inconsistences between slides, even if they are not errors (net sales, versus gross sales for example). It distracts, "pops" the flow
• Use real concepts instead of abstract ones, also in financial forecasts. Instead of cleaming 0.5% of a $1bn market, why would someone buy 1 product, how many customers do you think you can get, hence, what would your sales be.
• Give the audience a something to compare your idea against, to validate it (a comparable company, etc.(
• Finally, do a verbal wrapup (maybe with only a company logo on the slide), rather than a crammed slide that invites a repeat of the entire presentation

It is recommended to watch the whole video. More VC pitch templates here.

How to crop portrait pictures

Portrait pictures always come in different sizes, different background colors, different poses. Ideally, you would make one consistent photo shot. The next best alternative is fixing things using the crop function. If it not possible to resize/crop the pictures in such a way that faces have the exact same proportion, hold on to these guide lines:

• Eye lines at the same hight
• Eye lines close to the "golden proportion" of 62%

Flowgram - stitching web content together into a presentation

Ars Technica is featuring this review of Flowgram, a tool to create a sequence of web content (sites, Flickr photos, audio voice over) into one presentation-like format. Flowgram's founder has written a flowgram about - you guessed it - what is a flowgram here. This new tool seems particularly useful to develop presentation content that is loaded on a web page and designed for individual viewing. In a strange way, some of these web 2.0 presentation tools take some of the interactivity out of the internet and bring the online experience back to something that is called TV... Sit back and enjoy. UPDATE: Tony from Flowgram has a good point in the comments, Flowgram preserves the ability to click links during the presentation, so not that passive after all.