SlideMagic Blog

The Zynga IPO presentation made a statement that they created nine out of ten of the world’s biggest social games. There are two issues with this statement.

First, this very powerful statistic is buried inside a series of bullets. For you the presenter, it is a totally obvious shortcut. For the audience that just gets to you know your story, it is simply too short to grasp in full. Instead, spend an entire chart on this one point. Show the ranking of the top 10 social games. It will take you almost exactly the same time to present, and this time, with the ranking visually in front of them, the audience will get it.

The second problem with nine out of ten is that you take up 90% of some category. It does not mean much to the audience. What makes it interesting and more understandable is to contrast the top 10 with the top 15 or top 20. Shows which very famous titles did not make it in the list. Often, a concept is defined by its opposite.

The Zynga IPO presentation is in the public domain, you can watch the video here. I watched the first 15 minutes of the presentation. Some comments.

Overall it is a pretty good presentation. The slides are organized, decently formated, the speakers are clear. And I guess this is what you have to do for a video-ed delivery about an investment opportunity that is aired for everyone to see on the Internet.

But what could be improved?

I think the presentation was taped with a tele-prompter as the only audience. The pace of speaking is constant. The result could have been better to put in a small live audience in the camera room, to make the delivery more real, more emotional.

Zynga must have many highly skilled graphics designers. I would shed the red border around the slides, get rid of the clouds in the title, but ad more game props and other graphics inside the slides to get the Zynga cartoon-like graphic style in the slides. The team slide with the cartoon characters and the logos of the previous employers is a good example.

The opening slide with the bullet points is an example how bullet do not stick. The slide gets put up. We look at the speaker, try to figure him out. We look at the background, the globe, the dog, start reading the points and note that the speaker is sticking exactly to the bullets. The content of the bullets does not sink in. The bullet slide could have been shortened and instead the opening shot could be focussed on just one message: we have Amazon in shopping, Google in search, Facebook in social, and now there will be Zynga in gaming for the next decade. If you want to invest in social gaming, there is no alternative but to invest in us.

The other day I put a large picture of member of a management team in an investor presentation. “Hey, that one is much too large!” was the reaction of the client.

College year books and newspapers have programmed us to look for passport-sized images of people. Usually they have an inconsistent color and/or background, and people have an awkward starte into the lens of the photo booth.

You do not see images like this in well-designed magazines. Why not give your presentation that same look and feel. This is especially important if you email a presentation ahead of the actual live performance. The person opening the document might not know you and a big image might help establish a better connection.

So bigger images of management team members is one step. The next step up is to hire a good photographer and actually take a shot of the team working together. Preferably in a different pose than the ones we see in wedding family photos or football team shots.

“Look, we have proof! Excel says that we will be a $50m company in year 5, the hockey stick revenue forecast shows it all!”

No investor will buy this story. She knows the forecast is ridiculously optimistic, but she can check 2 things:

1. Is there more logic to the $50m than a conservative 5% of a $1bn IDC market forecast? Have you thought about how your business works, and how to think about its revenue potential? If not, the investor should invest in a company that claims the other 95% of the $1bn.
2. Are you driven, motivated, determined enough to go after the $50m against all the odds?

In other words, do you believe it yourself (really)? That might be the sign an investor is looking for.

In the first second you meet an investor, you want her to stop guessing what you are doing. Describe in a short sentence what you are about, then move on with the more detailed pitch. An investor who is guessing what you are about is not listening to you.

I pulled up the trending startups of last month on AngelList.

1. These slogans are targeted at investors, not (potential) customers
2. They do not contain buzzwords or fluff (at least 99% of them) and describe what you are doing (not one of these is enhancing the social browsing experience with sticky semantic and relevant content dissemination)
3. They can be very descriptive about what a company is about. Often direct comparisons to existing companies are used as a short cut.
4. Startups are not afraid to put these type of descriptions in the public domain. The benefit of interesting a large potential investor base far outweighs the thread of someone copying the idea (based on the slogan) overnight

Here are the first ones that come up:

• A high-quality, low-cost 3D printer that works out of the box
• Safe driver score
• Everyone’s second job
• Spy on competitor’s display ads
• Detailed social analytics for marketers, brands and agencies
• Meetup for mealtimes
• The Internet, peer-reviewed
• Video advertising platform for mobile apps
• Check in your daily accomplishments
• Evolving the user experience for web interaction
• An augmented reality gamification platform
• Simple social business CRM
• Mobile customer service ratings
• Daily deals matched with industry leading publishers through editorials
• Market place for artisan food
• Flipboard for documents
• Pinterest for places - spots you love from people you trust
• Yelp for health
• Beautifully simple dashboards
• Building the neighbor graph
• Cloud-based platform for visual and statistical text analysis

I see many startups pitching for VC or angel money early in their life. The investor presentation is often first piece of collateral that the company produces. The second one is a web presence and people ask me how it should look like.

A fund raising web site of a company that is not operating yet is completely different from one that provides a service and/or processes live transactions: it is a relatively static piece of fund raising content. The only visitors it is likely to get are investors you have met or heard about you checking out the company, or maybe potential users that have found out about you in the rumor mill. The web site should be designed with that audience in mind.

The content of an investor web site can be very minimal, look and feel should be highly professional. Let’s start with the look and feel.

• URL. Make sure that you have the URL to your company name and that your sites uses it (and that you use it for your emails). This is check 0 of an investor to see whether you are actually real or not. Gmail addresses and Google sites do not score you any points here.

• Template. The site needs to look like that of a serious company, not a MySpace social media profile. Just setting up a Wordpress blog in disguise (i.e., a blog template that is used as a static site) with a nice minimalist template should do (go to sites like Theme Forest to find one).

Venture capitalist Mark Suster has a blog with a large following, and is also active in producing video about venture funding and startups. A few days ago he hosted a live startup pitch for funding on his show. As I said before, I am a big fan of making (at least part of) the fund raising process more public. The 53 minute video is embedded below, I watched it and give some of my thoughts.

I have great respect for these entrepreneurs to be vulnerable and go with their pitch on video, and they were probably a lot more nervous than when sitting a conference room without a camera. I have made the comments below a bit sharper on purpose, in the hope that other people pitching for VC money can learn from them. In part I am helped by my Dutch/Israeli cultural environment where people use a slightly more direct style than in the US.

Look how Mark is forming an opinion about the business right in the first seconds. What is it that we talking about? Many investor presentation deck hold off the answer for too long.

The opening sentence full of buzz words gets cut short. Mark starts paraphrasing “Right, so you are a sort of eBay/Etsy widget for blogs”. It is indeed a better way of saying things, but hidden in this comment, Mark is already hinting at his major concern about the business. The presenters could have come out with a snappy/high-energy “OK, that you call it like that for now, but we have something amazing under the hood that makes us stand out in the middle of all these eCommerce giants, advertisers, and affiliate programs.”

Have a look at the DressRush investor presentation, an entire pitch deck written as a web site, in the public domain. Some of my observations.

I like publicly available investor pitches. It fits in the wave of increasing transparency in the startup funding market. (Check out Angel List). Startups can dramatically increase their access to potential investors by making part of their content public. The first stage of a fund raising round does not have to be the closed meeting room of the VCs that happen to be located in the same city as you are. Obviously you would not put your core IP, financials, or other sensitive strategic content in a public presentation. Another option would be to make the sensitive part of your investor pitch on your web site pass word protected.

I like these airy web sites. Lots of white space and information that you can scroll through freely, up and down. I actually first skim the whole site in a few seconds, then go back up to start reading in more detail. This is so much better than the nervous clicking on a small button in a SlideShare window (especially when people design slides that -click- break up -click- a sentence -click- in 5 -click- slides.

It is still tricky to design from this new medium though. The DressRush example uses beautiful muted colors (interrupted here and there by images and facebook logos) and takes an infographic approach to investor pitches. On certain pages it works, on others it does not. In whatever direction the technology develops, you still will need to eye of a good designer to get your investor pitch right, also in HTML.

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)

In many of my investor presentations I mix slide design styles.

• In the beginning, big images to catch the attention of the investor and make her feel the pain that you are trying to solve. These slides are good enough to put up in a big keynote address.
• Later on, more dense slides follow with details of the technical architecture, the financials and the team experience. These work in a small conference room, but definitely not on a large stage.

The slide design is not completely consistent, but I find it works well for me.