One-line investor pitches

In the first second you meet an investor, you want her to stop guessing what you are doing. Describe in a short sentence what you are about, then move on with the more detailed pitch. An investor who is guessing what you are about is not listening to you.

I pulled up the trending startups of last month on AngelList.

1. These slogans are targeted at investors, not (potential) customers
2. They do not contain buzzwords or fluff (at least 99% of them) and describe what you are doing (not one of these is enhancing the social browsing experience with sticky semantic and relevant content dissemination)
3. They can be very descriptive about what a company is about. Often direct comparisons to existing companies are used as a short cut.
4. Startups are not afraid to put these type of descriptions in the public domain. The benefit of interesting a large potential investor base far outweighs the thread of someone copying the idea (based on the slogan) overnight

Here are the first ones that come up:

• A high-quality, low-cost 3D printer that works out of the box
• Safe driver score
• Everyone's second job
• Spy on competitor's display ads
• Detailed social analytics for marketers, brands and agencies
• Meetup for mealtimes
• The Internet, peer-reviewed
• Video advertising platform for mobile apps
• Check in your daily accomplishments
• Evolving the user experience for web interaction
• An augmented reality gamification platform
• Simple social business CRM
• Mobile customer service ratings
• Daily deals matched with industry leading publishers through editorials
• Market place for artisan food
• Flipboard for documents
• Pinterest for places - spots you love from people you trust
• Yelp for health
• Beautifully simple dashboards
• Building the neighbor graph
• Cloud-based platform for visual and statistical text analysis

Not every one of these has the power of  “10,000 songs in your pocket”, but they are still pretty good.

Nothing wrong with manual charts

Automated charting is great if you want to analyze data quickly; grab an excel table and turn it into a chart with one click.

It is different in presentation design though. When you generate a chart in PowerPoint, the colors are off, there are ugly tick marks, the labels do not look right. In most cases, I create the chart almost entirely by hand. The only thing that PowerPoint does is generate the actual bars or columns, the rest is put on by me as text labels in the right place.

Usually a presentation only contains a few very important data charts, and they deserve the time to get them absolutely right.

In Paris early December (LeWeb'11)

I will be in Paris around the LeWeb'11 conference early December. Feel free to contact me if you would like to hook up in person.

Focus!

Here is a shape that I recently constructed to highlight that a company was doing lots and lots of things and all of it got focussed on just one area of expertise. The chart was not designed to read out the individual bits, but rather show that there are many, many, many aspects. Later, the presentation elaborates them one by one. You can see that I created the shape through a number of aligned triangles, alternating between the foreground color and white. Make sure that the biggest one is in the back, the smallest one at the front.

A camera in the hand of a kid

Slightly off topic topday. Here is a holiday gift idea for small children: a very cheap, simple digital camera with a huge memory card. The key is that the buttons are easy to use. The camera app on a discarded iPhone or iPod is still to fiddly for a small child to use.

The result is an amazing stream of pictures of the life of a child through her own eyes. Camera positions are low and subjects are interesting. Art work that she created. A castel that was built. Daddy checking email on his phone again and not paying attention to you. A nanny preparing the bath water. Mammy fixing car seats.



If you upload the camera images together with the ones you are taking, you get an amazing recording of family life organized with time stamps. Lower the resolution and the file size on the camera so she does not fill 4GB in 2 days though.

It is interesting to see that preserving visual memories does not really require pin sharp images with millions of pixels, it just needs someone to be there at the right moment, snapping the right image. Adults usually lose the moment. Your kid photographer will not.

Text columns in PowerPoint

Sometimes, you need to fill a PowerPoint slide with text. These slides are obviously not meant to be presented on a big screen. Still, I make them now and then; a legal disclaimer on page 1 of an investor presentation, detailed bios of the management team in the back, or a page of text in a PowerPoint document that is meant for reading rather than supporting a live presentation.

It is difficult for the eye to follow very long lines of text, because when the eye has reached the far right end of the sentence it has to move all the way back and find the start of the line below it. This gets hard with long lines. Also, long lines of text look ugly. Print designers discovered all this centuries ago, and invented the text column.

If you right click a text box in PowerPoint and select format text, you see that one of the options you can choose is columns (Mac). Play around with the number of columns and the white space in between them to get the desired effect. As an example, below are the opening paragraphs of Alice in Wonderland.

What is a good fund raising web site?

I see many startups pitching for VC or angel money early in their life. The investor presentation is often first piece of collateral that the company produces. The second one is a web presence and people ask me how it should look like.

A fund raising web site of a company that is not operating yet is completely different from one that provides a service and/or processes live transactions: it is a relatively static piece of fund raising content. The only visitors it is likely to get are investors you have met or heard about you checking out the company, or maybe potential users that have found out about you in the rumor mill. The web site should be designed with that audience in mind.

The content of an investor web site can be very minimal, look and feel should be highly professional. Let’s start with the look and feel.

• URL. Make sure that you have the URL to your company name and that your sites uses it (and that you use it for your emails). This is check 0 of an investor to see whether you are actually real or not. Gmail addresses and Google sites do not score you any points here.

• Template. The site needs to look like that of a serious company, not a MySpace social media profile. Just setting up a Wordpress blog in disguise (i.e., a blog template that is used as a static site) with a nice minimalist template should do (go to sites like Theme Forest to find one).

• Style, colors, and logo. The rules for designing good PowerPoint slides also apply to web pages. No need for spectacular effects, reflections, animations. It should just look clean and calm. Contrary to a PowerPoint slide, your logo should be up there (nicely done in a crystal clear sharp image, no dirty and blurry graphics here), and the color scheme of the web site should reflect the colors in the logo.

• Real images. If you put up pictures, make sure that they are of real people, and stay away from cheesy stock images. Anyone can see that pretty call center operator with hear headset is not manning your busy phones day and night.

Now moving on to content. This can be kept incredibly simple. At this stage in the life of the company, your site is a place holder, an online brochure. No need to add a lot of stuff, or start padding it with SEO terms. People get to your site by typing in the URL, not by Googling a keyword.

• You. Make sure that the names, (very short) bios, and - if possible - the pictures of your management team is on the site. Again, investors check out whether you exist, and it is re-assuring to see the names behind the company appear on the web site. Get decent bio pictures that are similar in style, or even better have a team group photo taken.

• An address. A physical address and a real phone number shows that you exist and that there is a way for people to contact you. 

• No dead feeds. A news section, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a blog should only be put on the site of their are humming with activity. A Twitter account with not followers and 2 Tweets and and the last news item from 2 years ago do not add to the credibility of your page.

• What do you do. A very simple and brief description about what the company is about (within the boundaries what you want to make public. You can apologize that at this stage you cannot disclose information but provide an email address to request beta invites or express interest as a potential investor.

So, these are the most important elements. For these, no web designer is required if you know how to program a blog template. The site gives you a professional online presence and not more. If you are daring though, you can consider putting up part of your actual investor presentation which is what this company did.

Note to self: remove that name tag

I am just looking at pictures of myself while presenting and realize that I forgot to take of these huge white name tags that you always have to wear in conferences... Well, it happens to the best of us.

Another situation where this produces poor pictures: group photos. A nice scatter of bright white, flash-reflecting squares smiling back at you. When you are posing in a group picture, ask everyone to put the tag in their pocket for a second.

Over-used: the temple framework

The pillar template goes back to the early days of PowerPoint. A building structure is a useful concept to show that things are dependent on each other, and will already collapse if only one pillar is removed. Still, using a Greek temple will give your PowerPoint presentation that instant 1990s feel. I am not sure that is what you want...

Avoiding the answer is not an answer

A politician in a television interview can sometimes get away with giving an answer to a different question than the one that was asked her. Or filling time with some meaningless generic statements, after which a smile indicates that she is ready for the next question.

In a VC fundraising pitch (or an interview for a position) this does not work. If you think you need more time to get to an answer, think before speaking. You cannot parallel process coming up with an answer and speak coherently (both will be bad). If you hope that by repeating something what you said before you might manage to skip the difficult question, it will just bore the VC and make her impatient.

Sometimes it might be best to admit that you do not know or do not want to disclose it.

Review of the live pitch to Mark Suster

Venture capitalist Mark Suster has a blog with a large following, and is also active in producing video about venture funding and startups. A few days ago he hosted a live startup pitch for funding on his show. As I said before, I am a big fan of making (at least part of) the fund raising process more public. The 53 minute video is embedded below, I watched it and give some of my thoughts.



I have great respect for these entrepreneurs to be vulnerable and go with their pitch on video, and they were probably a lot more nervous than when sitting a conference room without a camera. I have made the comments below a bit sharper on purpose, in the hope that other people pitching for VC money can learn from them. In part I am helped by my Dutch/Israeli cultural environment where people use a slightly more direct style than in the US.

Look how Mark is forming an opinion about the business right in the first seconds. What is it that we talking about? Many investor presentation deck hold off the answer for too long.

The opening sentence full of buzz words gets cut short. Mark starts paraphrasing “Right, so you are a sort of eBay/Etsy widget for blogs”. It is indeed a better way of saying things, but hidden in this comment, Mark is already hinting at his major concern about the business. The presenters could have come out with a snappy/high-energy “OK, that you call it like that for now, but we have something amazing under the hood that makes us stand out in the middle of all these eCommerce giants, advertisers, and affiliate programs.”

Next thing, see how Mark is zooming in on the team. He asks them a very open question (tell me about your background) that gives his intuition time to size up these people, Mark just observes them more than he is listening. His attention for detail comes back when he asks questions about years. Are there holes in the CVs, are these people that have a success track record (or successful failures).

Mark wants to know how solid the team relationship is. The entrepreneurs could have read on his blog that Mark does not believe in startup competitions (people have not enough time to get to know each other before deciding to spend then ext 5 years of their life together. In the end Sahney responds to the challenge and says “Look, 5 weeks is not a weekend, and I know what I am doing”. Exactly the response Mark wanted. One more thing on team, listen how he probes whether there is no hard feelings about the decision who is CEO (Mark is listening and looking people in the eye).

Here Mark admits that he has already made up his mind. This is where pitchers need to stand on their feet. Guessing the major concerns and adjust the pitch to iron out the weak spots. It is hard to do I admit, to go off script.

Then comes the product demo, and it is only here that the big idea of the business comes out: the eCommerce engine is filled by the community of the blog itself. This should have been linked straight to the widget comment that Mark made upfront. Mark himself is actually drawing out a lot of the arguments for the business, clarifying points that the entrepreneurs make in more woolly language (everyone takes about community, engagement, when talking about social media and blogs).

My feel is that the first vertical segment that the team choose: mom bloggers does not resonate well with VCs like Mark. Just a personal style thing. You could strengthen how this technology could also be applied in less feminine content segments. (Mark himself starts talking about cameras, electronics).

Know the details. Mark probes with detailed questions about CPMs whether the team understand the fundamental business drivers of the business they are operating in.

The team interprets some of the business suggestions Mark makes as criticism. How you could help small bloggers with interpreting their visitor data. Mark is testing how these people would be to work with. Do they respond to ideas? Can they build on input? Can they admit that they are wrong? Sometimes, when Mark asks a question, the entrepreneur repeats part of an answer he has given before. You can see Mark getting a bit restless, and cutting over to another question. Sometimes it is better to admit that you do not know, or Mark had a great idea.

So, stepping back. I think the biggest lesson from this is to anticipate the big concerns that a VC will have with you, more or less admit some of these weaknesses, but have a story about you go about fighting against the odds. Part of that is technology and your business. But part of that is energy, will power, and enthusiasm that needs to jump across from the other end of the table. And maybe because of the uncomfortable video setting of this interview, that spark did not fully light up here.

As a feedback to Mark, do more of these video pitches, but find a format to make them shorter and punchier, that will make it more interesting for the video audience to watch, but increase the quality of the pitches and the interaction as well I think. I would not mind if Mark would be a bit less polite and a bit more direct. Still nice, but make it a real business discussion. Who knows, maybe one day Mark will host The Apprentice or American Idols for aspiring entrepreneurs...

An iCloud-style cloud in PowerPoint

I often need a cloud shape in PowerPoint to draw a network diagram. The standard PowerPoint cloud is not very pretty. Here is a way to construct a new cloud shape in the style of the logo of the iCloud service by Apple.


Takamasa Matsumoto originally discovered how the iCloud logo is infused with golden ratios. If you use these proportions to draw some basic shapes in PowerPoint, you can combine them using the shape union command (on the Mac right click the selected shapes, go into grouping and select union). You see that I use 2 extra rectangles to fill up the shape.



Here is the final result compared to the standard PowerPoint cloud shape, with heavier lines around the shape.

Learning from impressionists

Every presentation slide should have a clear organization, and direct the eye. Paintings are a good example. Have a look at this painting by Monet: The garden at Sainte Adresse. It is clearly divided in 3 horizontal bands, has a strong diagonal cutting across, and the flags and steam clouds from the boats  provide energy that leads the eye from left to right.

Think of yourself as an interviewer

Back in the old days at McKinsey, your interviewing skills as a consultant on a team would be evaluated roughly on 3 levels: 1) you got the piece of information you needed (the market for [x] is $1bn, 2) you managed to get an insight that was completely new to the team, and 3) you actually made the interviewee realize something she did not know before.

Great journalists know exactly what questions to ask at what time in the interview. The interviewer draws out the story of the interviewee.



When designing a presentation think of your self as the interviewer. If you design something for someone else, then you can take it literally. If you design something for yourself, imagine interviewing yourself in front of a big audience.

Poor interview question: what five pieces of research support the assumption about the target market size? Good interview question: what, I thought only 5 people need this product, give me a feel for why this thing is huge? Poor interview question: "Now that we have spent the past 30 minutes analyzing the market, let me ask you: what do you actually want to achieve?" Good interview question: "before we dive in, tell us quickly what your ambition is". Poor interview question: "So let me re-phrase what I think your story is". Great interview question: "But is your story not a bigger one if we draw the parallel with this?"

Then you will have hit level 3, the interviewee walks out of the chair with a different perspective, and the re-designed presentation will be more than a beautification of existing slides. Which interview do you want to follow to the end, and which one will you skip with the mouse or remote control?

Image of Larry King and Vladimir Putin from Wikipedia

Investor presentation in HTML

Have a look at the DressRush investor presentation, an entire pitch deck written as a web site, in the public domain. Some of my observations.

I like publicly available investor pitches. It fits in the wave of increasing transparency in the startup funding market. (Check out Angel List). Startups can dramatically increase their access to potential investors by making part of their content public. The first stage of a fund raising round does not have to be the closed meeting room of the VCs that happen to be located in the same city as you are. Obviously you would not put your core IP, financials, or other sensitive strategic content in a public presentation. Another option would be to make the sensitive part of your investor pitch on your web site pass word protected.

I like these airy web sites. Lots of white space and information that you can scroll through freely, up and down. I actually first skim the whole site in a few seconds, then go back up to start reading in more detail. This is so much better than the nervous clicking on a small button in a SlideShare window (especially when people design slides that -click- break up -click- a sentence -click- in 5 -click- slides.

It is still tricky to design from this new medium though. The DressRush example uses beautiful muted colors (interrupted here and there by images and facebook logos) and takes an infographic approach to investor pitches. On certain pages it works, on others it does not. In whatever direction the technology develops, you still will need to eye of a good designer to get your investor pitch right, also in HTML.

I will continue to follow these developments with interest.

How to present a valuation

Hardly anyone puts a valuation number on a PowerPoint slide in an M&A negotiation or an investor pitch. In publicly quoted companies there are legal constraints, but most of all: a buyer is unlikely to believe a number put up buy the seller. So how do you as a seller get the buyer to move in the right direction using a presentation?

The answer is: teach and spoon-feed the right assumptions. Someone on the buy-side is going to construct an Excel valuation model of your business. Put yourself in her shoes and guide her through the process.

What components of value are there? The business units of today. The future growth of these existing businesses, but remind her to include growth options beyond that as well.

Valuation models are forward looking, financial data looks backward. So it is important to teach the buy side how to model your business going forward without giving the answer. Instead suggest how the sales of your business works (it is all about number of stores and sales per square meter). Suggest some non-financial growth rates, or give an indication of your store opening program. Explain how the cost structure works. We can support 50 more stores without adding cost to our head quarters.

Give the sell-side a quick refresh about the theory of calculating discount rates. What should be taken into account. What ranges of values do you see?

The best way to prepare such a presentation is actually to design a valuation model yourself without inside information. It teaches you the process the other side will go through.

In short: spoon-feeding the sell-side a valuation model is much more powerful than arguing over the point estimate of the outcome.

Note: the above is written with a relatively mature company in mind that has reasonably steady and predictable cashflows. Early-stage venture valuations are a different subject matter.

Two ways to emphasize text

Method 1 - emphasize subject: you can apply all bold, italics and underline effects, increase the font size, and pick a nice bright red character color (make sure you use all effects at the same time)

Method 2 - de-emphasize background: cut out all the visual clutter and distractions so that the point you want to make just appears by itself.

Guess which one I prefer?

Rosling presents with IKEA props

This TED talk by Hans Rosling (not the one that brought him world fame) is a great example of replacing PowerPoint slides with simple props.



(B.t.w., I like how he attached the Flip video camera stand to the Volvo car model)

Rubber stamping a business plan?

I had a phone call with a potential client yesterday. He needed an investor presentation but also was interested in a full business plan.

There are different documents that both are called business plan. One is a stack of files (spreadsheets, gantt charts, PowerPoint slides) that contains the company financials/budget, competitive analysis, and development mile stones. In short: real content. It does not have to look pretty.

The second one is a long document created in Microsoft Word in which market research data is copy pasted (IDC says our market is $1bn), the company opportunity is described with lots of buzz words, and so forth.

You need the first one, you can forget about the second type of business plan. They take forever to write, they take forever to iterate, and as a result they are always out of date. No one reads long written text. Brad Feld and others have called them obsolete.

My client admitted that the business plan job was simply a matter of writing up material that was already there. He was willing to invest lots of money and 2.5 months of work with a consulting firm to have the document rubber stamped, paying for the logo on the front page.

I think it is a waste of money, time, and effort. If the only thing the consulting firm does is write down stuff that already exists, investors will look right though it and judge the investment opportunity based on your content, not the way in which it is written. If it is market data you are after, pay for the market data directly, rather than by hiring a consulting firm in the middle.

Instead, spend a fraction of the 2.5 months time on creating a running slideument of PowerPoint slides and Excel sheets that is the first type of business plan that I was talking about. Change pages as new information becomes available. This document is the messy business plan that you can send to an investor who has expressed a serious interest and would like to dive deep in round 2 or 3 of the due diligence.

The real investor presentation is written for an audience that does not know you very well yet (round 0). It draws on information from the business plan slide deck, but not fully. This presentation are the visuals you feel you miss when you start explaining your business to someone new in 10 to 20 minutes and should be designed from scratch.

Are consultants always a waste of money? Not always (watch out I am biased having been one myself). They can be useful when there is a very specific problem to crack. For example: should we enter market A or B? And then, a firm is only useful if it adds new insights that cannot be bought from market research. A clever market forecast model, interviews with industry experts.

Another type of consultant who might be worth paying for is not a big firm with a big name, but a retired senior executive in the industry segment you are working. She can provide a very valuable expert opinion. These type of project are usually very short, but worth the money. You are not paying for analytical ground work, you are paying for the judgement of 30 years of experience delivered to you in 2 weeks.

In short, pay for real work, not rubber stamping.

If you are interested, here is an earlier post about why I do not believe in business plans.

Preaching to the converted

A story from the early 90s. Back then I had recently joined McKinsey as a Business Analyst and got involved in recruiting presentations at Dutch universities to try to convince more engineers to apply for a  position. The slide deck covered it all: our offices, our expertise, our clients, our selection process.

Until one day we did a survey asking the audience to rank how useful this presentation was. The outcome: people already knew that we were probably very smart, worked with prestigious clients, were unlikely to starve because of lack of financial resources, and were very professional.

The questions the students had were: are you guys human or nerds, do you really have to work 80 hours a week, how on earth can a physics engineer be useful there? These questions you cannot really address on a slide, so we cut the introduction presentation to the minimum (to re-confirm what people already knew), and then switched off the projector and started talking about us as a person, and opening up the discussion for questions.

Preaching to the converted is a waste of time. Instead, use your presentation to address the issues the audience has.