Mark Suster is a venture capitalist (VC) who is quietly building one of the world’s most-read blogs about entrepreneurship and VC investing. I suspect most people who read my blog subscribe to other blogs in areas such as (graphics) design and public speaking. Most of these blogs (including this one), are run by people who write presentations. Mark’s blog is different.
- Most of the time he sits in the audience listening to people trying to pitch a venture to him, but in an earlier stage in his career he was an entrepreneur himself sitting at the other side of the table (hence the name of his blog)
- He talks a lot about presentations and pitches, but these are mere tools to achieve a bigger goals: building a successful venture
I think anyone who is interested in presentation design should follow his blog. See his impressive list of posts about pitching to a VC. Or read his most recent post about not failing when presenting to large audiences. Full of great lessons for presenters and presentation designers, that are not only relevant in the world of VC fund raising.
Pitching to VCs is a great case example to learn about presentations in general:
- The stakes are incredibly high ($ millions)
- Each startup is a story that wants to change the world
- The story and ideas are highly personal (the entrepreneurs’s “baby” is on the block, people are judging the idea, but mostly the presenter herself)
- The audience is not captive (in most corporate presentations, the audience is required to sit it through, because the boss says so, a VC will not waist her time to listen to a poor presentation)