One minute pitches

Last night I attended a startup pitch event in New York where contestants had 60 seconds to pitch their idea, followed by 2 minutes of questioning by a panel of judges. Some observations on elevator pitches:

• No slides (everyone got that right)
• Get right to it, no uh oh, my background is, a small joke
• Most important thing in 60 seconds: get people to understand what you actually do. When rehearsing the 60 second pitch (easy to do) test not only whether people like your idea, but more importantly, do they understand what your idea is. I struggled to understand about one third of the ideas, and I am used to deciphering startup pitches, so it must have been worse for other members of the audience. Luckily the panel of experts was helpful and dragging it out of people in the Q and A. Example: an in-restaurant ordering system actually turned out to be a $3,000 table where guest could order food using an integrated touch screen. 
• Avoid going down a feature list, a user can do this, a user can do that, instead stick to the overall concept
• Do end your pitch with something more uplifting than “That’ it!”, even if you feel embarrassed that there are still 25 seconds left on your clock. This is actually a good thing.
• Tell people why the thing you do is so tricky. Example: nobody really got excited about a group video chat app until we learned that they solved a very complex technical issue in establishing a 1-to-many live video connection in 2 seconds 
• Breathe, pause, speak calmly. It is better to skip a few points than speaking to rapidly, nervously.
• In this case, the audience had a say in selecting the winner. They use different criteria than the professional VCs in the panel. For an audience entertainment value, or actually even the ability to remember what you were about after 20 pitches might be more important than the credentials of the founding team of your company. Pick the right battle, at the right time.

Why suffer?

Often when I visit a client and we do some on-site slide edits together, I am surprised to see how people suffer from working in PowerPoint because of things that can easily be prevented:

• Make sure you actually see what you do. Make your work area as big as possible, reduce the size of the slide note box to the minimum. If you have a docking station for your laptop, use it to hook up to the big monitor. Ask IT to help sort out a 2-screen configuration, where you can have presentation inputs (an older version with comments) can be on the small screen while you do your edits on the big screen (I went further and work on two 27" monitors, plus the 3rd  small screen of my laptop, one of the best investments I have ever made).
• Write down actions that you use all the time (aligning objects, [un]grouping items, switch to slide sorter view and back, etc.) and spend 20 minutes Googling how to do them using short cuts. Read this old post about how to create the essential PowerPoint toolbar.
• Use a proper mouse and not the IBM/Lenovo red dot
• If your computer is slow, close down windows, applications, de-clutter your machine until you have only the files open that you actually need
• Ask someone in IT to sort out the default settings in your PowerPoint template so that you do not have to look for fonts, colours, etc.

Flat design: good news for you

Flat design is the big trend in graphic design at the moment, and it is great news for the layman designer. You can stop worrying about what you thought were “sophisticated” graphics: 3D, drop shadows, gradients, reflections.

Take the Microsoft approach for example: blacks and greys, one bright accent color, tiles spaced out in a grid, thin font, sharp edges. Perfect for a presentation look and very easy to replicate. Resist the temptation to make it “sophisticated” again...

If you are interested in the Microsoft design revamp, here is a 45 minute video that provides a look in the kitchen:

Substance in TED

Many people claim that they now design TED-style presentations. They understand that bullet points are bad, and hey, it is actually very easy to put a word in white type on a black background (maybe even add that stunning image).

What many forget though, is that the substance of these TED talks is in the narrative, the story. Just having 10 slides that look like TED does not mean that your performance is TED-worthy. Sorry.

88% of spreadsheets have errors

A bug in an Excel spreadsheet influenced the outcome of an economic study. Flawed numbers can lead to bad decisions and/or take the credibility out of your presentation. “If the number on this page is wrong, I might as well have to check the numbers on every page....”

I have built my fair share of models (mostly discounted cash flow valuation models of big companies) and a small bug can make a few billion dollar difference in valuation.

My main strategy against bugs:

• Simple formulas: plus, minus, times, divided by. 
• If possible only 2 numbers per formula, intermediate results appear as another line
• Round up to a unit that leaves you with one digit behind the dot (millions, thousands, etc.)
• Everything points down, a result always depends on values higher up in the spreadsheet, never the other way around
• And finally: adhere to the rule that if it looks wrong, it is probably wrong. Averages should be within the minimum and the maximum value, gross margins are usually around 50%, etc. etc.

One story throughout

You can simply describe your product/app with a dry feature list. Better: you can use case examples to show how things work in practice. The best approach: use one case example/story throughout your entire presentation:

• You can go into a bit more depth to set the challenge your product tackles
• You do not need to reintroduce the case example all the time, we already know the full background of the main character in your story
• You can show that your product can be used on multiple occasions at different times of the day
• You can also introduce smaller features using the framework of the overall story
• You can instantly create a consistent look and feel across your presentation

PowerPoint as a picture frame

I am working with architects to help them pitch a building concept. The client requirement: no PowerPoint presentation, so we are designing the meeting around an informal discussion of sketches (some of them made on the spot).

PowerPoint will be reduced to a picture database from which we can pull up a building image quickly if (and only if) needed in the meeting.

How to pitch on demo days

I enjoyed talking to Israeli and Palestinian MEET graduates last Thursday about pitching at demo days. Here are some of the things we talked about:

• Objective: get to the next meeting rather than landing the full investment which you will never be able to pull off in five minutes
• 101: bullet points are boring (everyone knows this by now) and buzzwords do not work
• Entertainment: marathon investor pitches wears out the audience. When you are the first up, you need to make sure people still remember you at the end of the day. When you are number twenty seven, you need to make sure everyone is still awake. Make sure your pitch is high on entertainment value, while staying professional at the same time
• Five minutes: you cannot solve the time limitation by cramming in more content (denser slides, speaking faster), so chop those slides that are not important for the purpose of your pitch (getting to the next meeting). Detailed financial forecasts, team bios, technology explanations, can all wait for later
• Carefully plan your app demo. Show what you want to show, do not spend time on boring log in screens. Tell what the audience is seeing, it might be obvious to you that things are beautiful and fast, the audience does not see it. If you can, avoid a live demo in a 5 minute pitch and instead go for fail-proof screen shots
• One story throughout. If possible tie everything (consumer problem, your solution, demo) to one consistent case study throughout the entire five minutes.
• Rehearse until you drop. Five minutes of content can be rehearsed until you know the content in and out. Spontaneous guitar solos sound spontaneous because the guitarist knows her scales  and melody lines so she can improvise them

MEET offers Israeli and Palestinian high school students the opportunity to go through an advanced high-tech training program (coding, business) in cooperation with MIT. People work in joint teams for a couple of years in addition to their normal education. Selection is very tough, only the very brightest, most creative, and most entrepreneurial applicants make it through the admission process.

Join the MEET facebook page to stay up to date on the initiative.

Collapse into 1 slide

I get this suggestion a lot from clients who are concerned with the amount of slides in their decks. I usually push back, collapsing two messages into one (more busy) slide does not shorten the presentation.

When writing (without tinkering font size or margins): time = page count, when presenting: time = story.

He is just not lucky

Investors are not always 100% rational people. The other day an investor shared one of his criteria with me. If an entrepreneur has been hit by 14 cases of pure bad luck he is convinced that it will happen again for attempt 15. “Some guys are just not lucky.”

Featured on Indezine

Indezine posted a brief discussion of my presentation design book Pitch It!. Thank you!

A compelling pitch deck?

I was asked to answer the question “What makes a compelling pitch deck?” on Quora, and here is what I replied:

You can write books about this, so without giving a table of contents (Google it) here are some thoughts:

• Something that explains what you actually do (yes, some decks don't)
• Something that intrigues a potential investor enough to have another meeting with you
• Something that answers the big obvious elephant in the room questions ("What, that sounds like a page rank search engine")
• Something that shows through language/visuals/style/in-between-the-lines that you are a decent, honest, professional person to work with

Dry run guinea pigs

Before taking your pitch to your target investors it is important to practice your story for real. There are different guinea pigs available, recognise their strengths and weaknesses:

1. Your co-founder is blinded by the idea, just like you
2. Your parents probably do not really understand the concept but love everything you do
3. The speech coach really understands articulation, stance, and story flow, but will not spot that huge gaping hole in the business model
4. The friend of a friend of a friend who is an angel investor will suggest that you should make a comparison to that company featured in TechCrunch 2 months ago
5. The friend of a friend who owes a favor and is a VC does not really have time to go into the idea and will suggest to beef up the competitive analysis a bit, unfortunately he does not invest in businesses that are this early, come back in 6 months...
6. The casual friend who wants to be friendly but does not know you very well, does not have the courage to say what she really thinks
7. The management consultant sees problems everywhere and will suggest more analysis and risk mitigation

Still, each of the above has valuable input, just put it in context.

Harmonising headshots

Unfortunately, not many teams get together in one room for a team picture. The alternative team slide is a collage of headshots that are taken by different photographers at different times. How to make something decent out of it?

1. Make sure all images have exactly the same size
2. Crop all images so that the size of the head is more or less the same
3. Line up the eyes 1/3 from the top of each image
4. Go for a close up, losing some of the top of the face if required
5. Make the images black and white
6. Increase the brightness of selected images if require

From the archives: a 2008 post on the same subject.

Lots of them

If that is your message, you can write the sentence “There are 45 applications” with a cutely formated 45 on a background of a stunning image. The other solution is to write out the applications in 45 boxes that are nicely spaced out over the page. The latter solution is more cluttered, but actually makes the point in a more convincing way.

Data chart surgery

Related to Monday‘s post, there is another way to use a poor quality data chart image in your slide. Crop out all text elements (axis labels, footers, titles, etc.) until you are just left with the lines/bars/columns themselves. Set the background color of your slide to the same color as the image and manually recreate the text labels (if necessary, many graph images contain huge footers and duplicate titles that you do not need).

Pretty versus effective

This Tweet is spot on:

Tired of seeing "pretty" slides that suck at communicating. </rant>
— Roger Courville (@1080Group) April 8, 2013

Making pretty slides (beautiful picture, nice font) is not the same as making effective slides.

Extracting data from a poor graph

Sometimes the image quality of a graph is low, and/or the color scheme does not match yours, that you may want to recreate the data chart in PowerPoint. If there are proper labels, it is no problem. If not, here is a fix:

1. To measure the values of a column or bar chart accurately, you need an image that is as big as possible. I usually make a physical printout of a stretched chart image on an A4 paper.
2. Measure the bars/columns in millimeters
3. Decide the real value for your biggest bar/column, and using its millimeter value determine the value for all the other bars/columns
4. Now you can recreate the data chart. Since your values are not 100% accurate, do not use data labels, but simply put a value axis on the side of the graph (like it was the case in the source image).

Make the point on every page?

If there is a very important message in your story, there is no need to make it on every page in your presentation. Fifteen half-baked bullet points are not as powerful as one carefully crafted slide that drives your message home. Added side benefit: you can make your presentation even shorter!

Where do all the posts come from?

I get this question sometimes. Almost all content on this blog are disguised client examples. Every morning I sit down, reflect on what happened yesterday, and extract from it a small piece of advice that could make you a better designer. The advantage of being in the trenches of presentation design day to day.