There is no upside in bending the truth in VC pitches

Politicians can make optimistic promises for the future, even if they know deep in their hearts that it will be (almost) impossible to deliver. Four years is a long time, memory is short, and the average member of the audience is unlikely to go through the numbers in detail. A VC (venture capitalist) pitch is totally different. If you make it pas the first VC partner meeting, a gruesome due diligence will start that will bring every fact to the surface. It won't start in four years, it starts tomorrow.

Management team integrity ("can I trust this guy") is probably a more important investment criterium than your actual business idea. If you flunk this test, you will have blown your VC pitch for your current venture, but worse, you are black-listed for years, maybe even decades to come as:

• a person to invest in
• a person to do business with
• a person to build a partnership with
• a person to hire
• a person to believe

What to do if there are some not-so-great-details about your startup?

• Avoid the subject as much as possible in a "cold-call" presentation, a deck that you send out to the world and is mostly read without you being in the room ("more data about customer uptake in recent pilots will be provided upon request")
• Once in the VC partner meeting, have your perfect explanation ready: why it happened (including the explanation "I -beep- up", and what you will do to turn things around.

It's your only option, think about your integrity, reputation, consciousness, and your chances of winning the VC pitch.

Comparing an online presentation and a "Desperate Housewives" episode

For those readers who are not directly involved in the high tech industry (and are not reading Fred Wilson's blog on a daily basis), have a look at this presentation:

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

Some observations:

• It is designed using the big images/big fonts style, one that is very suitable for online viewing (we are all impatient clickers).
• The interesting content makes us click through all the 263 pages, and the key messages will stick in our heads as a result. Something that is hardly the case with most 30-pagers in this style on SlideShare.
• The presentation is a potpourri of styles but I do not think this is a problem (You can see presentation Zen images, Tom Peters-style giant words, Back of the Napkin sketches). They are all used to build the case: some set the mood, some focus us to pause (and read a detailed quote), some explain a concept.
• Hey, what about the title for this blog post? If you use 263 images, you have a new technique at your disposal: repeat. Images of Madison Avenue, or Egyptian cave art work bring the reader back to previous points in the presentation. Almost like a TV series such as "Desperate Housewives" in which each episode as a handful of almost independent sub-plots.

Setting your presentation's personality

Usually, I still fail to do this 100%: setting the personality of a presentation and using it consistently throughout the slides. What contributes to a presentation personality:

• The basics: colors and fonts
• Slide design approach: huge images/few words, "Economist-style" data diagrams (headline message supported by a graph), bullets (uh oh), cartoon-style, etc.
• Type of images: color or B&W, "tacky" stock images or real pictures, people or landscapes/buildings or isolated objects, funny or serious, vintage or recent, images-only or illustration-only, etc.

One example of a consistent personality is a teenage bedroom: decoration, posters, are all in a consistent style. And the style fits the personality of the owner as well.

Let's think of a few possible presentation personalities:

• Vintage 1950s images (family scenes, food advertising, first electrical appliances)
• College humor (brutal, in-your-face, "funny" stock images isolated on white)
• Zen (few colors, calm images, Helvetica light font)
• Feminine (paintings, elegant images, some frivolous elements)
• Economist (clean/neat data charts, one after another)
• Cartoon (hand drawings, cartoon-type fonts, including very fat ones ["BANG"])
• Napkin-style (simplistic drawings, hand-written/white-board style comments on printed text)
• Macho (black background, performance cars)
• Big words on a white background
• Big words on a colorful background (Tom Peters)
• Anti-design presentation (see Dave McClure's work, I am only discussing his presentation personality, not his real one...)

The list can go on forever. Think about personality when designing your next presentation, taking into account your own personality, the topic at hand, your audience's personality, your mood. And try to stick to it.

Related reading a post by Olivia Mitchell on The top 7 PowerPoint slide designs.

Filling parts of a data chart with an image

This ad on Ads of the World uses an effect that you can easily replicate in PowerPoint. Select a data point (or a data series), right click, fill, and select "image".

Chart concept - not there yet

OK, we made some significant achievements, but we still have a loooong way to go. How to visualize this? Here is one solution inspired by a solar system constellation. Working with actual numbers can add a nice twist: take a bite of 0.5 million out of 1.5 billion can be visualized differently.

Reduce font size to increase readability

A follow-up on yesterday's post about avoiding bold fonts whenever you can. Sometimes, reducing font sizes can actually help you increase the readability of a point. See the example below.

Why is it easier to read the box on the right? (At least I find it easier to read)

• There is (empty) white space around the text, drawing my attention to the sentence that now sticks out. On the left side, the sentence blends into the very loud background noise of the slide. The text now looks like a coherent piece of information that can be interpreted by the brain in one snapshot, as opposed to the left side where we need to read out each word left to right, top to bottom to see what's written there.
• The proportion of the text block is more rectangular, close to the 16:9 aspect ratio of a wide screen TV, a shape that is more natural for the brain to absorb information
• Removing the bold font except for one word makes the whole typography more calm and easier to read
• Taking out screaming exclamation marks and left-aligning the paragraph improves readability further

Less is more.

Bold fonts as a last resort

Typography designers design a bold variety of a font as if it were a completely new type face. There is no magic computer algorithm that turns a regular font into a bold one. From scratch, designers need to make the call about balance and readability all over again.

I think bold fonts do not look as good as regular ones. They are often bulky and lacking elegance. Italics/bold fonts are usually even worse.

What to do as a presentation designer? Design your slide without bold fonts initially, and only add bold as a last resort. Your first tool of emphasis should be to increase the size of the font/

• To highlight a single word, rather than inflating a whole sentence
• To give more contrast to text written over an image as a background
• To highlight a label in 10pt font or smaller in a complex diagram such as an IT system architecture

(Not) surprisingly, I find that regular slide titles look better than bold ones. Adjust your template if you can.

Somewhat related, a post on color as a last resort.

The new London 2012 Olympic pictograms

The pictograms for the 2012 Olympic games were launched yesterday, designed by Yasmine. Glancing back over the pictograms of the past decades (a new set is designed for every tournament), I actually still like those of the 1972 Munich games best (designed by Otl Aicher). Simple, recognizable, and full of movement and energy.

Somewhat related, designs for Olympic posters that were not adopted in an earlier post. Again simple and full of motion.

Calming down your presentation images (sequence)

The audience might feel a little bit like they just stepped out of a roller coaster after you showed them your 30 images in 10 minutes presentation. Some suggestions to calm things down:

• Not every concept needs a supporting image. "We're running out of time" [click - image of a time bomb ticking away]. "We're under pressure" [click - Atlas lifting the globe on his shoulders]. "It's either" [click - A pot of gold] or "the end" [click - image of the Grand Canyon]. A data chart showing a rapid decline in sales over the past month will do if you want to create a sense of urgency...
• Consider taking the color out of your images. Black and white images, or images with a monochrome overlay look more in harmony with a presentation's color scheme.

The cinematic presentation opening

Film directors can use powerful tools to throw us in the middle of a story right in the first seconds of a movie. Steven Spielberg's opening of Saving Private Ryan is a gruesome but good example. Everyone in the audience thinks "Wow, I should be grateful to these guys that drew the short straw and had to come out of the boat first..."

Presenters can use similar techniques. Try to find big images with a perspective as if they were taken from someone in the middle of the issue you are talking about. These images trigger an emotional response from the audience, especially (and maybe only) if they are "real". Think of photographs that make it on the front page of a newspaper.

The following 2 images could lead into a presentation about the issue of maternal deaths due to poor living and health conditions in the slums of India:

Less powerful examples of images with a patient or victim perspective here and here. Many of my investor pitch presentations use different styles of charts throughout the presentation:

1. Emotional opening (images) to connect the audience to the problem
2. Conceptual diagrams (arrows, boxes) to explain why my solution solves it
3. Data charts to show why this is a big deal
4. "Standard", almost slideument, charts to give more background on the company

P.S. Read more about the great work that the Acumen Fund is doing to combat the issue of maternal deaths here.

Chart concept - can't see the forest through the trees

Sometimes you can't see the forest through the trees. How to visualize this? The ad below uses a technique that can be copied easily in PowerPoint: a huge word/sentence in a bold font covered by a set of fat, spaced out stripes in the same color as the text. Via Ads of the World.

The color goes in last

Garr Reynolds wrote a beautiful post on what Zen arts can teach us about minimal use of color. Let's take things down to the very practical level: how to use these concepts when sitting behind your slideware edit screen.

• Make sure your template has a decent color scheme that works well with your corporate colors. See one of my earlier post how to set one up.
• Design your charts in black and white. Really, switch off the colors, and give it your best shot using only shades of grey. This is especially useful when working on busy data charts or complex IT architecture diagrams.
• Now start adding additional background colors from the template to group items together that belong to each other. A cluster of servers, all pieces of a pie chart that relate to manufacturing businesses, etc. Within each background color, again use shadings as if you were working in black and white. A very light orange database server, with a slightly darker orange data pipe coming in, and label it "data base server" with an almost brown orange font.
• Finally add very bright accent colors to highlight aspects of the chart. The server with breached security that is letting all kind of viruses into the network definitely deserves a dash of red.

The key lesson: the color goes in last (if at all).

Chart concept - easier to get in than out

Some places are easy to get in, and hard to get out. (That one-off discount which becomes permanent for example). How to visualize this?

Things that come to mind (the one-way revolving door, permanent temporary structures such as the Eiffel Tower or the London Eye) are not obvious when you use them in a slide. "You see, your discount scheme is a bit like the Eiffel tower". Blank stare.

Images of someone stuck in a well and looking up into the light do work. The idea was triggered when I found myself inside the double helix staircase in the Château de Chambord in France, and looking up. Stock image sites also have lots of "inside a well" images.

There is a bigger point in this: presentation designers should look at cinema direction to move audiences inside a scene or a situation and make them "feel" what your message means. A future blog post on this is in the pipeline

How to scale an image to full-size in PowerPoint

Most people have now caught on to the idea of using large images in presentations. But with a few graphics design tricks you can make things look even better:

• Make sure that they are not stretched or squeezed: the proportions between height and width are the same as in the original
• If the image is big, go all the way and have it cover your entire slide.

Here is how to do it:

1. Right-click the image, select format picture and click "reset picture" to restore the original aspect ratio (between height and width)
2. Re-size by dragging a corner until both the height or the width are at least equal to the full screen
3. Reposition the image and crop the bits of the image that are sticking outside the canvas
4. Select the image, press format and compress pictures to reduce the file size of your presentation

Cool - make your own picture mosaic

Many new technologies in enterpriseA software help you see the bigger picture that is hiding in various bits of information and data scattered across the organization. One option to visualize this in a presentation is through impressionism (painters such as Monet).

Another one is through a photo mosaic. This ancient post on Engadget still holds. You can download the software AndreaMosaic here. It's freeware, as you as you give it credit when you use it. Hereby. Installation and use instructions can be found on the site.

Kindergarten teacher crowd control techniques

I watched in amazement the other day when I saw my child's kindergarten teacher calming down a rioting group of 5 year olds in a matter of seconds. Maybe there are some presentation lessons here:

• Start telling a story, build anticipation
• Lower (and not raise!) your voice
• Ask people to imagine/see/hear something
• Maintain direct personal eye contact with everyone in the room
• Ask people questions, encourage them to contribute, have audience members listen to each other, even put them on the spot (in the center of the circle of kids)

These 5 year olds are most certainly a more difficult crowd than a grown-up presentation audience...

Calling all professional presentation designers: do a pro-bono project

I have been working on a probono project recently: designing a presentation for free for an organization pursuing a great cause. I can recommend this to any professional presentation designer.

• A much larger leverage than simply donating money. Fund raising presentation case example: you use a unique skill you have, giving your pro-bono client the ability to raise a large amount of money, which in turn can be deployed for the good cause.
• These companies are a dream to work for as a presentation designer. The stories that they need to tell are so strong that your presentation is almost guaranteed to be a great success. Moreover, you will find that these pro-bono clients are more willing to push the boundaries of presentation design and try new techniques than your regular corporate clients.

Some guidelines for selecting your project:

• Pick a cause that you are really passionate about and believe in
• The best pro-bono clients will actually interview and test your skills as if this was a paid-for project. Don't be offended, it brings me to my next point:
• Treat the relationship with a pro-bono client as you would do with any other client: agree deliverables and deadlines, and meet them. Once you promise a presentation, these people need to rely on you. There is no room for "sorry, a paying client called me, you'll have to wait 2 weeks"
• Don't even think about pay back, putting a logo, a reference, etc. The cause should be your motivation. Chances are that if you did a great job, the word will spread and benefit you somehow in the medium term. But if it doesn't, that is fine too. If you feel the need to make a return-on-investment calculation, the pro-bono project is not the right thing for you

Pitch MY problem - not YOUR solution

I am catching up on Dave McClure's blog. Here is another good post (strong language alert): when pitching to venture capitalists (VCs)::

1. When people emotionally connect to the problem
2. You earn the permission to introduce your solution

Many startup pitch presentations are designed the other way around:

1. Take some technical architecture slides from the product roadmap deck
2. Add some stuff upfront to show that the world needs this ("that $1bn IDC number sounds good", "hey, let's plop in this Gartner quote and leave the date February 2007 out")

OK, there is more to an investor pitch than just talking about the problem. The relative importance of the problem pitch on the development stage of the market you are operating in.

• If you would be pitching Twitter 5 years ago, you will have had to spend 99% of your presentation on why there is something missing in the way people communicate on the Internet. "Yeah right, people are interested to follow SMS-es from 1,500 strangers all day?". Pitch the problem.
• If you claim to be able to beat the Google search engine, you better spend 99% of your presentation showing that your technology works. "OK, let's see what comes up when I type [VC PARTNER NAME]". Pitch the solution.

A great presentation ignoring EVERYTHING suggested on this blog

Presenters should pick their own slide design style. The safe option is to read this blog, read Presentation Zen, read Slide:ology, and other resources and apply the principles as best as you can to your deck. But hey, the world would be pretty boring if all of us did this.

Why not do the exact opposite what the presentation design establishment is trying to teach you - on purpose?

Dave McClure is an investor in startups that does exactly that. Random colors, bullet points galore, "love that clip art", arbitrarily placed images, and some pretty rough language. Kicking the presentation etiquette. Building businesses is all about getting your hands dirty, passion & energy, and ignoring slick packaging. It's the substance that matters.

Here is a recent presentation (some strong language):

Startup Metrics for Pirates (FOWA London, Oct 2009)

View more presentations from Dave McClure.

The resulting presentation is actually pretty good. I am sure the "show" on the London stage was great. And through reading the slides I get the main point about feature focus. If you have Dave's substance and confidence, there is nothing holding you back to deliver a presentation like this. Another example of a presentation by Dave: how to pitch to a VC (strong language)

Chart concept - the chain reaction

Sometimes a stable situation can easily be knocked out of balance, triggering an irreversible chain reaction of events. How to visualize this? A nuclear mushroom might be slightly too explosive. An image of a series of falling domino stones might be too cliche. Here is another idea based on a toy: