Brutal honesty and a 5 second test

I am linking to 2 posts related to venture capitalist Vinod Koshla today.

The first is about brutal honesty in investor presentations by Michael Arrington. He argues that indirect polite language because people are afraid to turn down a startup is not helping anyone (including the pitching startup).

The second is a blog post by speech coach Jerry Weisman: the 5 second test. If your (test) audience fails to produce the point of a slide when you hide at after 5 seconds, the slide is too complex. An audience trying to figure out what a slide means is not listening to the audio track.

(Thank you Wouter Deelman for pointing this out to me)