SlideMagic Blog

Yesterday evening I attended a dinner in honor of a famous scientist who received a honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv university. The setting was a beautiful coast-side villa of a successful businessmen, the audience: scientists and healthcare technology investors (corporate and venture capital). On the menu: some good food and 6 presentations. Here are some suggestions for scientists who get put “on the menu” for these types of events.

Investors. You have 6 minutes, you have 2 audiences: scientists and investors. This is probably not the right time to get insightful feedback from your science colleagues, however, you might hook the attention from a potential investor in your research you would not have met otherwise. So take the investor as your target audience and shape your content for her. Out with the detailed methodology, the detailed statistics, the history of your research, but in with the need (why is this such a horrible disease and how many people suffer from it), why is what you did so clever (other technologies fail, yours takes a fundamentally different approach), and why the early trial data shows that it works. And oh, if you are raising money for your project, say so.

Only charts when you need them. Six minutes: no bullet points, just pictures you need (statistical data, pictures of team members). Put black slides if you do not need the projector. A huge white screen in a dark garden completely overpowers the presenter.

Simplified statistics. Putting up the full scientifically responsible data chart over dinner is not effective. Laymen do not know how to read it. First explain what benchmark matters (survival rate for example). Then, make an incredibly simple char that compares the 2 benchmarks without the footnotes, n values, p values, standard deviation. All that can be discussed over coffee, not a glass of wine.

Many presentation I come across start out great with the cover slide, and maybe a page or 2 after tat, then the whole thing slides back into bullet point mode. Why not continue the good work beyond page 3?

As a management consultant (or a scientist) you had to crack a very difficult issue: what approach to take to solve a particular problem or get to some insight. Once the approach was nailed, the rest of the work was relatively easy (sweat work rather than think work).

It is tempting to use this thought process as a structure of your presentation. Here is the problem, here is the theory behind it, here is our methodology, here is the data analysis, and finally, here is the conclusion. Most scientific papers are structured this way and kids get taught this approach in school/university.

This works if your audience also consists of management consultants and scientists. In most other cases, just talk about the problem you tried to solve (the actual one, not the approach issue) and then go straight to the conclusion and results.

Fred Wilson wrote an interesting blog post yesterday about the sequence in which a startup should nail the following items:

1. First the product
2. Only then the strategy (who is your target market, and how are you reaching them)
3. Only then the business model (how you charge for things)

Most VCs will ask you about the business model and strategy in your early-stage investor pitch. The true answer: “I do not know yet”. Stopping the discussion there is not a good answer. Making up something and selling it is the truth and the only truth might cost you credibility points.

The middle ground is better. Admit that things are early, and discuss 1-2 strategy/business models scenarios that seem sensible given the stage of development you are at and what you know about the market at the moment. It shows that you are a sane person and a trusted pair of hands as you embark with your investor on an uncertain journey in which everything will deviate from plan for sure.

A bit of ambiguity in your pitch is OK.

The corporate strategy of a big company is always complex: many countries, many products, marketing, sales, manufacturing, organisation, finance, tax optimisation, M&A. Writing all that stuff down in an investor presentation does not make compelling prose.

Most companies understand that but swing the other way: a big vague broad mission statement that says we will conquer the world of [ENTER MARKET] and make the plant a better place at the same time.

Here is a potential middle ground. Start with the 3-5 really big ideas that will create growth for your company, pretty much like a startup would present its ambitious plans. Then follow with a more organised, structured, traditional overview of all the programs that are going on. Not to be discussed in detail, but merely to show that you have put them in place.

Medium is a new publishing platform and I gave it a try with a first post on how bad design habits from the 1990s still cause dammage today (overhead transparencies, word processors).

Medium allows you to create collections and I started one about presentation design, pitching ideas, and public speaking under the name “Seeing is believing”. Feel free to contribute.

Although I like the clean design and focus on writing of Medium, it is too early for me to give up the good old Blogger platform, with many of you reading my posts via RSS and email updates.

The objective of a technology sales presentation is to convince your potential client of how great your product is, and how poor the competition.

Assumption: the above is actually true, which makes designing a presentation a lot easier.

One approach is to list all the benefits, and in a few more charts show that the competition does not have them (most of the times, without naming names explicitly). This story does not stick very well, a feature list that seem unrelated.

Better is to dive in a bit into the detail. Often technical products have one specific innovation, one characteristic of the architecture, one design approach that triggers all of the goodness mentioned above. Now that the customer understands this (and Einstein said that you can explain anything to everyone - even a 6 year old), it becomes a lot easier for her to understand the full picture.

Yes, most venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) investors need to rais money themselves, usually from institutional investors (large insurance companies and asset managers).

When pitching, these investors often make the same mistakes the companies pitching to them make.  The most common one: a story that is not very differentiated. Careful deal selection, deep involvement with your portfolio companies, really working with management. Institutional investors get pitched all the time by VC/PE funds that say exactly the same thing.

The best VC/PE investor pitches are those that tell a story about a really distinctive type of investor, where everything reinforces each other: the backgrounds of the investment team, the deals you picked, the exit track record. Some funds have great access to deal flow in the telecom industry, some funds are really good in bidding for privatizations, some are really good in turnarounds, some have a really deep understanding of bio molecular structures,  some have a unique skill in stitching together innovative financing structures. It is very rare that all of the above work for one fund.

Chris Anderson is the curator of TED and has written an article with some excellent suggestion on how to give a presentation of TED-like quality. Some of the points discussed in the article:

• Plan your story: beginning, middle, end
• No jargon, keep things conversational, cut back on the ego, show that you are vulnerable
• People do not relate to descriptions of organisations/institutions
• Do not try to cover too much ground, you need to go into some level of detail to keep things interesting
• Let the audience draw conclusions themselves, not everything has to be spoon-fed
• Really, really, memorize your talk in order to be spontaneous. Sort-of memorising is the worst, you are not your improvising self, but the words do not flow either with frequent memory pauses giving away that you are playing off a script
• When rehearsing, think what feedback you need to take in, and what not. Usually, experienced speakers give the most useful feedback
• Stay relatively stationary on stage, emphasise with arm gestures, keep eye contact with a few people in the audience
• Use slides only if you have to make a point that needs visual backup
• When using video: keep it short, and think twice before including a sound track
• Final advice: be yourself

I am starting to work with the CEO of a very large company to design a presentation for 1-on-1 meetings with institutional investors. I am thinking of a presentation designed for iPad, or even a loose stack of slide print outs that can be randomly selected as the need comes up in the meeting.

The big story of the company can probably be explained verbally in a conversation, these slides that are typically included in a presentation for a big audience can be left out. But then, equity analysts are likely to have detailed questions that require factual backup slides that are denser in design than the ones you would typically use for a large audience investor update.

An interesting project.