SlideMagic Blog

This question was asked by David Semaria on Mark Suster’s excellent blog “Both sides of the table”, a must read for anyone who needs to pitch to VCs.

Here is my take on the question why TED presentations are so “polished”:

1. A tough pre-selection: you need an interesting story even before the PPT slideware is opened to create the presenation
2. A ruthless 18 minutes cutoff makes you practice
3. Peer pressure of a good speaker line up makes you practice
4. The “threat” of a global video audience makes you practice

You can argue that it can be hard to sometimes to meet point number 1. Number 2, 3 and 4 are all about practice, your presentation can benefit from it too. There is no excuse not to practice, practice, and practice.

After a first review of Prezi and pptPlex I started to get into a more detail with Prezi. One of the applications of these zooming tools is to create an effect of a perpetually zooming canvas. (There is a series of children books that uses this effect brilliantly.)

You can see my Prezi creation here (put together very quickly). Zoom out with your mouse to get the full picture. All images were taken from iStockphoto.

iQ font - When driving becomes writing / Full making of.

An unusual approach to font design. You can download the font here. Via Swissmiss. If you are into design, you should follow her blog.

A while ago I posted a fairly critical review of the abuse of the Skype PowerPoint template. The first sentence of my post however was: “Skype has a beautiful and very strong visual identity”.

Spot on. Browse through this document with guidelines for creating documents in the “Skype look”. You can learn from it even if you are not designing for Skype. Beautiful graphics. Nicely written to give you directions but leaving you enough creative room to make your own designs.

Skype- corporate identity_ how do we look

Colors in data charts. This 2003-2007 compatibility issue drives me crazy. Many of my clients still use Office 2003. Does anyone have a solution?

• PPT 2003 uses Microsoft Graph for data charts, PPT 2007 Excel
• I create a chart in 2007
• I save the 2007 PPTX in 2003 PPT format
• I (or my client) opens the 2003 PPT file and
• right-clicks the chart to open it: all the colors are off…

I have to change every color manually using RGB codes to set them permanently to the correct value in 2003.

There must be a better way to do this! Let me know if you know.

McKinsey and other management consultants love 2x2 matrices (and obviously 3x3s). Personally, I think they are often overused (framework overload).

Not every categorization can be crammed into this framework.

• The axes need to be logical
• The groups needs to lead to 4 categories, i.e., leaving one or two boxes as “not applicable” does not make sense
• They work particularly well when you want to show things moving from one category to the other
• They are good to show that something stands out (from for example the competition) by popping up in the top-right corner

Here are some other techniques to group items on a PowerPoint slide using line and venn diagrams:

• Diagram 2 - “you cannot have it both ways”
• Diagram 3 - “the best of both worlds”

Presentations to analysts and investors are very important for publicly traded companies: they have a direct impact on the share price.

In this interview for the McKinsey Quarterly, Gartner CFO Christopher Lafond lays out his investor relations strategy:

• Segment and prioritize investors you want to talk to (in his case funds that have a long-term interest in Gartner, and do their homework to understand the fundamentals of the business)
• Focus on a very limited number of performance metrics, not shying away from internal, operational metrics that are usually only discussed by management
• Educate investors why these are important

Note: (free) registration to the McKinsey Quarterly might be required to read this article.

Google released its Q3 2008 results yesterday. Besides the usual reports, a PDF was released to support the earnings conference call with investors (someone uploaded it to slideshare, see below).

Google Q3 2008 Earnings Slides

Investor presentations are very important and can greatly influence the share price of a company. The remote conference call format makes it even more challenging to control the presentation delivery. It is a shame to see that even the world’s most resourceful companies like Google invest so little in these documents.

• Busy bullet point slides
• Busy data tables
• Busy data charts with redundant information

The presentation gives the impression that after the hard work to meet the publication deadline someone thought last minute to knock up some slides to accompany the conference call. There is clearly an opportunity to rais the bar here.

Posted on TechCrunch today. A presentation of VC firm Sequoia to portfolio companies. You can click through it in a few minutes. From a presentation design perspective, not great (i.e., not all slides are perfectly designed with many bullet points, but what do you do if you have to put something together quickly), but not completely bad either. The content is slightly depressing though for startups trying to raise money (many of my clients). CEO_ALL_HANDS_10-7-08_FINAL - Free Legal Forms UPDATE: someone making fun of this presentation here.

I updated an earlier post with VC pitch templates available on the web:

• The TechCrunch pitch guidelines, and Jason Calacanis’ recommendations on how to “demo your startup”, part two is here.
• VC funding for geeks by Mark Hedlund
• Top 10 VC objections posted on Altgate, here a link to Altgate’s popular posts.
• Alliance of Angeles presentation guidelines, and downloadable template, the structure of this template is OK, the graphical execution is not
• Advice by David. S. Rose
• Brad Feld on the Torturous world of PowerPoint
• Guy Kawasaki’s the art of pitching, “How to pick up a VC”, and “The no-bullshiitake-investor-wishlist”.
• Bill Reichert on an entrepreneur’s 2007 New Year’s resolution: I will fix my pitch
• Genisis Partners’ (Israeli VC) pitch presentation template
• The Extreme Presentation Method’s interview with VCs: part 1 and part 2
• How not to write a business plan by David Cowan
• Steve Jobs in a video from the 90s going analogue to explain the distinctiveness of NeXT.
• Expert tips on pitching on pitching a winner by Alyssa Royse
• What not to wear: 5 cring-worthy phrases in investor pitches by Rebecca Lovell
• Why startup pitches fail by Eric Ries.
• Paul Graham on fund raising, link collection by Eric Ries