SlideMagic Blog

While browsing Hugh MacLeod’s “gapingvoid” blog (wonderful cartoons) I stumbled across this online investment pitch for an enterprise software startup that calls itself thingamy.

There are different phases in VC due dilligence. The 60 second look, the first 15 minute meeting, the first hour spend, sitting through a pitch and finally the complete “turn everything upside down” check on the company.

You should read the blog post by VC-ist Brad Feld about “Saying no in 60 seconds”: investors are ploughing through huge deal flows and need to make up their mind quickly to avoid wasting a startup’s time, and wasting their own time that they could have spent on deals they want to do, or working with their portfolio companies. It sounds harsh, but a polite “thank you” after a 60 second analysis is still better than no answer at all.

So I took the 60 second stage of due dilligence (as a VC amateur, but a professional presentation ptich designer). My feedback.

Things I really liked:

• It’s public. The fact that you are looking ofr money, the story behind your company, all available to see for everyone on the Internet. More startups should have the confidence to do this. Spread your story within the boundaries of proprietary IP.

• The headlines and the supporting cartoons on the 30megs site.

• The completely different approach to fund raising gets you a plus as an entrepreneur/team.

Things that can be improved:

• Getting the practical “what do you actually do” out there quickly. In 60 secons it was still not competely clear to me. I am sure that in an hour I will find it out, but people like Brad Feld have made up their mind by then.
• The menu structure on the company site makes it a bit hard to read the text. Maybe a standard piece of text would have been calmer to the eye.

Depth of field is an under-used technique in PowerPoint. Here is an idea for a slide I used for a client that has a powerful solution against spam. Repeating and object many times can give dramatic effects.

More 3D tricks here.

Presentations shared online are different from the “classical” setup of a presenter giving a live talk backed up by some visuals. Online presentations need to stand on their own, without verbal explanation, and need to be able to attract viewers without the help of “please sit down, the presentation will start now”.

Seth Godin posted some good thoughts about what makes an effective book cover. Jeff Bailey asked the question whether this only applies to books. The answer is no. Especially when your presentation has to stand out in SlideShare or on the notice board near the university coffee machine.

Certain industries do not seem to be subject to change (but maybe a new startup is about to change all this!). I like to use images of the moai on Easter Island to visualize this kind of market environment.

Photo credit: Natmandu. For these type of “real” images it is much better to go to sites like Flickr then to stock image sites (check the image license though).

My life and business partner Anat Naschitz has a strong interest in the arts. She recently created a chart for a client that needed to show how its solution makes it possible to see beyond the dots and construct the full picture (in a medical application).

The painting “The Seine at La Grande Jatte” by Seurat is an example of the pointillism style. An approach similar to the CYMK technique used in many printers today. (Seurat starred in a previous post on this blog as well).

The round cutouts were made by setting the background of the PowerPoint shape to “slide background”. The curly font used is Curlz MT.

Mashable pointed to this usefull tool yesterday. Aviary is an “in-the-cloud” image manipulation utility (trying to take on Photoshop and others). To lure more users to their site, they have created a neat screen shot capture tool (bookmark this URL).

I use screen shots a lot, and until now relied on CTRL-PRT SCR, followed by a paste into a PowerPoint slide. (For example to extract tag clouds from Wordle) Two drawbacks:

• A huge, very wide image (I have a large screen resolutions) gets plopped into your slide that you need to crop by switching the PowerPoint zoom to 33%
• A partial web page image (PRT SCR only captures what’s on the screen)

The Aviary tool is more useful:

• Simple: type in aviary.com followed by the URL you want to capture, for example aviary.com/http://ww.axiom.co.il if you want to make a screen shot of my corporate site www.axiom.co.il.
• The image (covering the entire web page including parts that are not on the screen) opens up in a basic image editor for cropping.
• You can save the image for future use

Long shadows can add great perspective to a slide. Lucky Luke needs them to show off his speed. Photographers like Heinrich Heidersberger have used them nicely in photo compositions (see the “Street Scene” image below)

They are very easy to make in PowerPoint. I suggest forgetting about the built-in shadow functions of PowerPoint, they can be tricky control. Instead, draw your shadows using rectangular boxes. Below a chart that can be used as a setting to display the 3 (or so) key messages of a presentation on a final slide (excuse the bullet points):

A neat trick. Select your text, go to “format” and select “text fill”. The font I used in the example below is “Showcard Gothic”.

Presentation design needs time. Squeezing out the last slides the night before the deadline will make your presentation look like, well, a document that was squeezed out the night before the deadline (most management consulting presentations). Give yourself lapse time to complete your presentation. A day of work spread out over a week gives much better results than sprinting from 18:00 to 02:00.

Most ideas come at times and places when you least expect it, and when you don’t always have a note book around. Evernote seems like a useful tool. Capture things on whatever device is convenient, but most importantly, archive it and make it searchable. This archiving is the most important feature I think. Finding notes, mobile phone images, yellow stickies, I lose most of them.

Maybe a special case of Fred Wilson’s “watch later” concept: stumbling on things when you do not have time to deal with it, putting it away somewhere for later access.

Via Lifehacker

Weekend reading. A site with signs and portraits of homeless people. It makes you think. You got a piece of card board and a marker (in fact that’s all you got), now write the best “pitch” slide you can…

Via Swiss Miss.