Spring cleaning: de-personalizing your laptop
If you use your laptop to present slides in presentations, it is time to let go of all that personal screen real estate such as cute family pictures. Screen savers kicking in with images of you in the pool with your 2 year old son, instant message popups, wallpapers showing off your new motor bike are all very interesting to you, but not to your audience. Spring cleaning time.
A few tickets left for my NY seminars next week
I am very happy with the signup rate for my NY seminars next week. There are still a few seats left, you can sign up here using the "ideatransplant" promotion code. I am preparing for my flight and hope to get to see some of my New York readers in person next week.
Memory and stories
Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein (affiliate link), shows an interesting technique to memorize a string of unrelated object: imagine them one by one positioned on a familiar path. Boiled egg on the driveway, duck at the front door, 17" MacBook pro at the bottom of the stairs, etc.
Speaking of ducks, the Hebrew word for duck is ברווז, or barvaz. Imagine that duck sitting in a cafe, having a coffee, while in the distance you can see that huge red vase sitting on top of the bar. Barvas.
It shows that our spatial memory is much stronger than our ability to remember a list of bullet points. It might have something to do with our ancestors whose key to survival was to remember the location of that apple tree, and even more importantly, the way back home.
Stories are a great framework to store and memorize facts and ideas. It comes naturally. This might also be an explanation of why you can remember an entire 2 hour discussion by just looking at a messy, incomprehensible white board full of scribbles.
Speaking of ducks, the Hebrew word for duck is ברווז, or barvaz. Imagine that duck sitting in a cafe, having a coffee, while in the distance you can see that huge red vase sitting on top of the bar. Barvas.
It shows that our spatial memory is much stronger than our ability to remember a list of bullet points. It might have something to do with our ancestors whose key to survival was to remember the location of that apple tree, and even more importantly, the way back home.
Stories are a great framework to store and memorize facts and ideas. It comes naturally. This might also be an explanation of why you can remember an entire 2 hour discussion by just looking at a messy, incomprehensible white board full of scribbles.
Send me an executive summary
When an investor is running out of time, conversations often end with "why don't you email me an executive summary".
Upon hearing that, startups wil scramble to produce the well-known executive summary format, compressing the entire pitch deck in just a few paragraphs:
Think of this from the investor perspective: this document is boring and so dense that it would take the same amount of time to read it start to finish than to page-down through a slide deck. Here is an alternative: "I am sending you a 5 minute pitch"
Upon hearing that, startups wil scramble to produce the well-known executive summary format, compressing the entire pitch deck in just a few paragraphs:
- Has to fit 2 pages, so no space for visuals, use a small font or narrow margins if required
- Stuff the text with buzzwords and big numbers
- Include all the features of your product
- Spend a lot of paragraphs on CV details of the founding team
Think of this from the investor perspective: this document is boring and so dense that it would take the same amount of time to read it start to finish than to page-down through a slide deck. Here is an alternative: "I am sending you a 5 minute pitch"
- A short and visual document, but it could be longer than 2 pages
- Explaining the investment opportunity in human language
- Focus more on the problem, less on financial, product details, and team details (that can come later)
- The objective is not to get the investment (yet), but to get invited to the next stage in the investment process, possibly a full pitch meeting
My new Macbook Pro setup
So I replaced my computing infrastructure over the past week. Things are moving fast in the world of IT.
- Laptop. A few years ago having decent graphical power still restricted you to using desktops. No longer. I have gone mobile. (Maybe motion graphics will make me regret it later). No I can use those little downtimes in between meetings to do actual useful work, rather than catching up on email or Twitter.
- 17", I compared screen sizes and concluded that as a visual designer there is no avoiding the extra weight and size to get a decent size screen
- Apple. Strangely enough it is actually the physical interfaces that convinced me. A nice machine to touch, nice keyboard, nice track pad. Something you spend the majority of your day on. Interestingly, a hardware decision, not a software one.
- Cloud. It was surprisingly simple to move to a new environment when all your critical data resides in the cloud: email on gmail, files in dropbox (affiliate link), clients and invoices in Freshbooks (affiliate link), contacts in Batchbook. Everything is in sync on my new machine, and the legacy infrastructure that I continue to use as backup. 1Password synced via Dropbox to keep track of all the accounts
- Virtual Windows/OSX blur. None of my clients use Keynote, and PowerPoint on Mac is simply not good enough (see a comparison between PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac). So in comes Windows, but I totally do not notice it. I use Parallels to create a virtual machine, and my Windows applications run in a Window as if I am working on a Mac. All data is shared and file management happens via OSX. It requires beefing up the hardware though. I put in 8GB of memory, of which I allocate 5GB to the Windows machine. The big customer segment for Parallels is actually hardcore gamers who want to port their favorite graphics-intensive games to the Mac. As a result, performance of a Windows virtual machine is actually very good. There is only a slight delay when you switch over.
- Adobe alternatives. Adobe software is incredibly complicated and bloated. I need basic photo editing capabilities to resize images for the web and take out backgrounds out of images. Pixelmator is a beautiful Mac app that can do all these things (and much more) in a beautiful user interface. The same with Illustrator, I need it to edit stock vector diagrams nothing more. I could not find an alternative for Mac yet and as a result kept my old Windows CS3 installed (I see no need to upgrade). It is interesting to see that I started to look at user interfaces to decide my software, not so much the features anymore (same story as in hardware).
- Legacy software. Some of my clients (mostly the large ones) are still running PowerPoint 2003. Hence I actually installed it in parallel to my production software PowerPoint 2010. (It took some time to dig up those old CDs).
Financial forecasting in VC presentations
The financial forecast in a VC pitch presentation combines two different pieces of financial information in one chart. Still, you can treat them differently.
- The short term burn rate. This is information should highly precise and accurate. An investor is 100% sure she will "lose" this money. If you cannot be accurate, you probably do not have a clue what investment is required to build the company
- The long-term dream. There is no point specifying that you will have $50,342,784.12m sales in year 5. You just don't know and claiming that you do will lose you realism points. Explain to an investor why you think it will be ~$50m
Reuters issues a 1-page online annual report
Slowly, large publicly traded companies are starting to experiment with Internet and social media as alternatives to the dry and boring annual report. Reuters just issued a 1-page version (see it here), with a promise that over the next few days, this will be followed up with more detailed blog posts about the company and its financial results.
Early online annual reports were a pain. They basically were print documents put online and you had to keep on clicking on "next" links to get to the following page. Rendering of tables and data in basic HTML also did not provide good results. Combine that with slow page loads and you get a pretty useless experience.
New display protocols (and certainly HTML5) will give PowerPoint-like fast navigation controls to online documents. I think a hybrid of a traditional slide presentation, advanced (and fast) web navigation, video and other multi-media, plus social aspects will give a powerful distribution platform for financial data. You get the best of both worlds: PowerPoint-style visualization of data and key strategic messes, and nicely-formated text for those who want more details. Certainly for public investor presentations such as this one, but also for confidential documents. You can distribute login details to (potential) investors you want to share your data with and exclude them from the online data room as soon as the deal process has stopped.
There are also great opportunities in sales. I rarely use a PowerPoint presentation anymore to introduce my own services for example. Rather, I just take people through a few sections of my web site, either in person or via a remote presentation tool. SalesCrunch, the company that is organizing my upcoming New York presentations, is trying to create a platform for these remote sales presentations.
Back to the Reuters annual report. I learned something from the way the graphics of the financials are done. I like the dividend history chart, a bit unusual, but it shows both the trend and the detail of the numbers. The big column charts might not be the right format though. Large stable companies do not grow that fast and the columns show hardly any change. Also, the big difference in absolute size between the revenue and profit column does not look optimal. It would have been better to put the $ values as text, but rather make a graph of the % increase.
I am looking forward to the additional blog posts that will come out over the next week.
Thank you Dominic Jones for leading me to this report.
Early online annual reports were a pain. They basically were print documents put online and you had to keep on clicking on "next" links to get to the following page. Rendering of tables and data in basic HTML also did not provide good results. Combine that with slow page loads and you get a pretty useless experience.
New display protocols (and certainly HTML5) will give PowerPoint-like fast navigation controls to online documents. I think a hybrid of a traditional slide presentation, advanced (and fast) web navigation, video and other multi-media, plus social aspects will give a powerful distribution platform for financial data. You get the best of both worlds: PowerPoint-style visualization of data and key strategic messes, and nicely-formated text for those who want more details. Certainly for public investor presentations such as this one, but also for confidential documents. You can distribute login details to (potential) investors you want to share your data with and exclude them from the online data room as soon as the deal process has stopped.
There are also great opportunities in sales. I rarely use a PowerPoint presentation anymore to introduce my own services for example. Rather, I just take people through a few sections of my web site, either in person or via a remote presentation tool. SalesCrunch, the company that is organizing my upcoming New York presentations, is trying to create a platform for these remote sales presentations.
Back to the Reuters annual report. I learned something from the way the graphics of the financials are done. I like the dividend history chart, a bit unusual, but it shows both the trend and the detail of the numbers. The big column charts might not be the right format though. Large stable companies do not grow that fast and the columns show hardly any change. Also, the big difference in absolute size between the revenue and profit column does not look optimal. It would have been better to put the $ values as text, but rather make a graph of the % increase.
I am looking forward to the additional blog posts that will come out over the next week.
Thank you Dominic Jones for leading me to this report.
The sales presentation is only a small part of the sales meeting
A potential customer has many ways to get information about your product:
- There is information on your web site
- Your competitors bring the client up the learning curve about the industry
- In your preparation phone calls with the prospect, already a lot of information gets exchanged
- Maybe you sent the customer a copy of the slides of the sales presentation in advance
- There could be a product demo that the client already has been playing with
So, when you finally enter that meeting room, it is good to think about the value of the precious 1.5 hour of face time. Maybe it is not about information transfer. Maybe it is about giving your client an opportunity to get exposed to what they have not seen before: you in action, in person.
- What type of supplier are you?
- What about integrity?
- Can you be trusted?
- Do you understand their questions?
- Are you flexible?
- Etc.
The sales presentation is an excuse to figure you out.
A review of PowerPoint 2010 (Windows) versus PowerPoint 2011 (Mac)
I have now spent a few days doing real presentation design client work on PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. This post brings together impressions published in earlier blog posts.
The bottom line is that the average user will not notice any differences between the 2 versions of PowerPoint. Some positives:
The bottom line is that the average user will not notice any differences between the 2 versions of PowerPoint. Some positives:
- The application has slightly more Mac fee to it
- I like the organized way fonts weights are grouped together.
- The integration with Aperture, a photo organizer is very good. If you buy images from iStockPhoto, somehow a lot of keywords are saved with the file. PowerPoint 2011 integrates seamlessly with Aperture, making the full library of images on your hard drive searchable by keyword.
- The selection pane, a great tool construct complex layered diagrams is missing. (An earlier post about the selection pane here)
- Toolbar customization could make PowerPoint 2011 crash. Especially, do not try to drag the straight arrow connector into your top toolbar. If your software has been corrupted, see this Microsoft post about how to fix things. [UPDATE, THE RELEASE OF SP 1 MIGHT HAVE SOLVED THIS ISSUE]
- Whenever you try to move or resize an object very close to the static guides, PowerPoint will decide to move the static guide, not the object, and staying on the subject of static guides: you cannot space the interval at which you want to set static guides.
- Color rendering can be a bit off. When give the text and its background shape the same color, you can still read the text on the Mac, but not on the PC. PowerPoint for the Mac handles colors for shapes and text differently.
- PowerPoint for Mac cannot embed custom fonts (PowerPoint Ninja explains what this is)
- You cannot insert vector shapes in the Mac version of PowerPoint (see here why this is can be useful), so if you want to adjust the color of a vector diagram, you have to do it in Illustrator and import the illustration as a picture into PowerPoint.
The bottom line: professional presentation designers should check their end product on both machines before shipping it to the client. For the rest of the users (99.9%), people probably will not notice the difference.
Thank you to Pierre Morsa and Magda Maslowska for contributing some of the ideas in this post. Pierre sums up: "There are many good reasons to use a Mac, PowerPoint is not one of them."
Images from Chernobyl
The current crisis at Japan's nuclear plants triggered this morning's NYT article about Chernobyl, which will need to wait for another 300 years before it can be inhabited by humans again.
The confusion and uncertainty experienced by the people in Japan must be similar to the surreal experience I went through here in Israel while unpacking government-issued gas masks and constructing a biological/chemical shelter in one of our bed rooms just before the 2nd Iraq war in 2003. I remember taping the windows during live TV coverage of Tony Blair's speech in the House of Commons advocating military action.
This photo set on Flickr by Tim Suess is both scary and beautiful at the same time.
The confusion and uncertainty experienced by the people in Japan must be similar to the surreal experience I went through here in Israel while unpacking government-issued gas masks and constructing a biological/chemical shelter in one of our bed rooms just before the 2nd Iraq war in 2003. I remember taping the windows during live TV coverage of Tony Blair's speech in the House of Commons advocating military action.
This photo set on Flickr by Tim Suess is both scary and beautiful at the same time.
I think I found the cause of the Office 2011 toolbar bug
I was in the process of designing a beautiful chart on my new Mac when I got too confident and decided to modify the toolbars of PowerPoint 2011 and... lost all my work again (see my previous rant about this bug)
In sbort: if you customize your toolbar in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac, the program will crash as soon as you enter slideshow mode. Googling around reveals that many users have similar problems: corrupt toolbar files that cause crashing. I decided to dig a bit deeper and through a process of trial and error found that the offending customization button are the straight arrow ones that you find in the autoshape menu. The icon of these bars still have the old PowerPoint 2008 look, I think Microsoft forgot to update them.
They are probably not that many geeky PowerPoint users that would customize their toolbar with straight arrow connector buttons so it would have been hard to uncover the bug. :-)
I am forwarding this post to someone in Microsoft I know, but if there are any Microsoft MVPs reading this post, please pass it on and ask Microsoft to fix the bug.
The post that I originally planned to post will to have to wait a bit...
In sbort: if you customize your toolbar in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac, the program will crash as soon as you enter slideshow mode. Googling around reveals that many users have similar problems: corrupt toolbar files that cause crashing. I decided to dig a bit deeper and through a process of trial and error found that the offending customization button are the straight arrow ones that you find in the autoshape menu. The icon of these bars still have the old PowerPoint 2008 look, I think Microsoft forgot to update them.
They are probably not that many geeky PowerPoint users that would customize their toolbar with straight arrow connector buttons so it would have been hard to uncover the bug. :-)
I am forwarding this post to someone in Microsoft I know, but if there are any Microsoft MVPs reading this post, please pass it on and ask Microsoft to fix the bug.
The post that I originally planned to post will to have to wait a bit...
Narrow fonts: Beebas
Some fonts are suitable for small text, some for large text, and some for headlines. Narrow fonts are especially useful for the latter. You can still fit in a lot of information, even for large type sizes. See the differences below. Beebas Neue is a free font that is very space efficient, you can download it here.
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