SlideMagic Blog

The average investor pitch deck gets better and better (bad news for presentation designers like me). SlideShare, video streams of startup competitions, TED videos, all create examples of good presentations that people can copy.

Five years ago, version 1 would be a horribly looking bullet point document with standard Microsoft Office fonts/colours, full of small low resolution images scraped from Google with their aspect ratios distorted, that is changing.

Many startups have some sort of designer involved, she gets pulled of the web site work to give the slide deck a much needed make over. The result: decent looking slides, decent colour scheme, decent story flow, still lots of bullet point slides, but at least they are written properly, newspaper heading style.

How to push it one more level up?

Focus on the content, not so much on the local and feel which is already pretty OK. Here is a check list of possible mistakes:

• Think about where to focus your time/slides. Many of these decent presentations spend too much time stating the obvious. Instead go one level deeper: everyone seems to understand the problem, but why is it that in 2014 we sill have not found a solution for it?
• Add more substance to your competitive differentiation. A simple 2x2 matrix with generic sounding axes is not always enough. Why are these other companies doing something different while it sounds like they do exactly the same thing you do? And why do they do it differently? Very rarely, this will because of stupidity, there is probably another reason these companies focus on a different solution for a different customer segment.
• Even if your bullet points are short and well-written, remember that as soon as you start listing more than 3-5 benefits/differentiators, the audience will perceive this as no benefits/differentiators. Bla, bla, bla

A live app demo is not the same as an introduction of what your app does. Getting the technology to work, logging in as a dummy user, creating some dummy files, showing some dummy output, changing some settings, quickly going back to the management console, before switching to the user screen. All this shows that the app is real, it exists, the beautiful design, the fast response time, the powerful algorithms. But it is step 2 in the introduction, the audience is missing step 1, the overall context of what problem the app solves, and what it actually does. Time to throw in some good old slides that can get these messages across faster/better than a live demo. Then, fire up the tablet.

When you get a question during your presentation, should you abandon your story flow and answer it? It depends.

• For very large audiences, no. One person’s question does not merit throwing out your carefully crafted story line and potentially confuse the rest of the audience. Answer the question very briefly (“Good point, we use super glue for that, I will get back to it later in more detail”) and move on.
• For smaller audiences that have seen the material you are presenting before, probably yes. For example a presentation to the partner group of a venture capital firm.
• In one on one meetings: definitely yes. These meetings are not presentations, they are conversations and you should adjust the story flow based on questions, interruptions of the other person. If there are none, then follow the script, but that is likely going to be a boring meeting.

Last week, I sat in the same seat many of my clients sit in: the one facing a VC. I had a couple of meetings in the valley to test initial appetite for my “PowerPoint killer” web app.

The body language in these meetings was very interesting. In all these meetings you could clearly see when people where excited, agree with you, do not agree with you, listen to you, are not listening to you because they are thinking about something else (probably the next question), already got what you want to say.

Read the signals and use them to steer the conversation in your meeting. But this might be hard to do in real time. The big use of this feedback will be your next VC meeting.

Arguing with investors will hardly ever change their mind. Investors have one or both of the following characteristics: 1) they know what they are talking about, 2) they are convinced that they know what they are talking about. A successful investor probably has a lot of 1).

Repeating the same argument over and over does not get you anywhere. Pulling out an unexpected, little-know fact though, might get you some points, and showing that your are not a dogmatic person to work with, but can listen and work constructively with a Board member gets you lots of points.

Paul Graham wrote a great piece of start up advice, targeted at students but valuable for everyone. The relevant bit for investor presentations is when he talks about playing tricks, or gaming the system. Fund raising is a highly visible metric for success, you have a slick investor presentation, you got a lot of funding, you have shiny offices, you must be successful.

Paul says it does not work* like that and you can see how this experienced investor is looking for a honest start story without the smoke screens. An encouraging read for entrepreneurs out there that have deep experience in a field, are on to a big idea, but are wondering whether they have the confidence to convince investors.

• Well, he says that you might be able to trick investors once, maybe twice, but ultimately the truth will come out.

Some startup ideas, anyone can relate to. A new social network, a smartphone-based door key, an new calendar scheduling app. Some startup ideas are in industries that are a bit more esoteric.

For a general audience, you need to take it nice and slow at the beginning. Explain the current process, the current situation, and the current problem, and then [boom] comes the innovation. For investors in the know, you can start with [boom] directly (production costs per hecto liter are now a mere $35.50 without any chemical waste, can you believe it?).

But if your novice audience is reasonably intelligent the pitch for both the novice and the experienced audience is pretty much the same after the [boom] slide.

For example in the medical field: it takes years and years and years to become a qualified doctor. Doctors know a lot about a lot of things. One tiny, tiny, tiny subsegment of medicine can be understood reasonably well in 15-30 minutes.

I will be running a number of workshops for biotech startups in the QB3 Accelerator of the University of California in San Francisco. The plenary presentation is open to the general public. I will be talking about pitching early stage business ideas to investors.

The event takes place on Wednesday October 8, at 17:00, at Mission Hall, room 1400, UCSF Mission Bay (550 16th St., San Francisco). Admission is free.

Details of the event are here, registration can be done here.

The PPM (private placement memorandum) is a big book that investment bankers prepare when they want to sell a company. It contains all the facts about the company, the legal fine print, disclaimers, and warnings about risks.

Often, this PPM gets used without modification as the sales presentation (investor presentation) of the company. Unfortunately, your presentation design efforts starts with the PPM, rather than ends with it.

Why is a PPM a poor sales document? It contains too many pages, it has a logical rather than a story structure, it is not targeted at a specific type of investor, it is not very visual.

What to do? Finish the PPM, put it aside, and start designing a sales/investor presentation from start, for a specific type of investor. Tell why she should buy your company, and eliminate all facts and detail that are not essential for the first meeting.

The full PPM is the fact base that is needed for the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent meetings, not the first one.

As I prepare to start pitching my own startup (a “PowerPoint killer”) to potential investors I am going through the same process many of my own clients go through. Blinded by my own idea, I am surprised what questions, facial expressions, and other feedback I get when talking to other people. After every discussion I learn more about how to pitch my company.

Every idea has the text book pitch story. It is only by talking to people you find out which elements of the story are obvious/taken for granted (i.e., no need to spend time on them), and which ones are controversial and/or hard to understand.