SlideMagic Blog

The traditional business plan used to be a 200 page Microsoft Word document. A large part of it was filled with fluffy market background information and more fluffy industry buzzwords, frameworks and mission statements. It was always out of date. Its primary purpose was to rest your hand on it and say: “We have a business plan”. Nobody would really read it.

In most startups, the business plan is replaced with a large PowerPoint slide deck that evolves rapidly over time. A selection of the slides in this document are upgraded to be used in standup presentations. The vast majority of them are dense appendix material.

Daniel Tenner wrote a good blog post about what it means when an investors asks whether you can email her a business plan. In short, after the initial pitch, the investor wants a document that can be emailed (forwarded to partners) that answers some fundamental questions about your venture. The content should be good, the content can be short, and you can afford to invest less in the design of the slides.

You do not win over VCs by trying to prove your point by entering a debating contest (even if you are right). The two of you have to sit on a Board together. The VC needs to pick Board seats, the entrepreneur needs to pick battles.

Last week I was presenting at a startup pitch competition at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel. After my talk, the contestants had 3 minute each to pitch their business idea. Some observations inspired by the evening, and not necessarily related to any of the contestants.

• Do not speak too fast. It is better to make sure the audience gets all you say, than cram in a 10 minute pitch in 3 minutes. OK, do not go the other extreme and speak so slowly that it becomes boring to listen to.
• Say what you are doing early on. Starting with a nice story and revealing your venture at 2:10 gives the audience 50 seconds to assess your business. While I always advocate to sell the problem, not the solution, sometimes you might have to cut the problem section short if you have just 3 minutes. “Gasoline prices are high”, that is it, time to move on to what you want to do about it.
• Decide what is really important in a first pitch. Some details such as extensive elaborations on revenue models or team backgrounds can probably wait for your second 30 minute pitch.
• Do not bring up concerns that take a lot of time to explain, you want to keep the excitement and momentum going. Examples: complicated comparisons against the competition, or a defense why you picked a small market segment to start. Three minutes is not enough to present the results of a strategy consulting project.

I have now written a few pitch presentations in the healthcare sector. Medicine is complicated because professionals use incredibly difficult terminology (often derived from Latin) And the worst for a presentation designer: long words that are impossible to fit in boxes and shapes. A second factor adding to the complexity is the sheer breadth of knowledge required to understand things (doctors study for a long time before being allowed to practice).

The result of this: incomprehensible pitch decks that can only be understood by medical professionals or investors with some sort of medical degree.

In my designs, I try to get the best of both worlds: a presentation that is completely understandable to an outsider, and still credible to a medical professional.

• Start the presentation with a very short 101 on the disease area that can be skipped by professionals. Medicine is complicated, but when you zoom in to one micro therapy area it is actually surprisingly simple. Especially for medical devices (biotech is harder).
• Aim to write the presentation with zero professional terms. Usually I can get there with a few exceptions.

Medicine seems similar to the legal practice, where over the years, practitioners developed their own “secret language”. It is time to open this up, especially when doctors need to face the outside world to get their startup ideas funded.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that video pitches have a great future. Especially as an alternative to startup fund raising decks that now get emailed “cold” to potential investors. Why?

• The world is moving to a minimalist presentation design style that makes it harder to understand decks without verbal explanation.
• Somehow, I find audio tracks not very interesting to listen to. They take too long for a situation where you do not have direct interaction with the speaker. They just go on and on
• Startup pitch competitions have shown me that it is possible to get across a lot in just a few minutes of presentation time. You just need to prepare. Videos are high profile, people will invest a lot of time in getting it right. The result will be a higher quality pitch than someone “winging it” in front of a live audience
• A very important part of an investor pitch is the team. A video of the presenter gives already some clue about the CEO of the business.
• You can make sure people will listen to your entire story. When you set expectations (watch this 5 minute video) and investors see the counter counting down I think it is highly likely that they will go through to the end. Much more likely than a slide deck: click, click, click, “bleep” from the Blackberry and they get distracted.

Other big applications could be job interviews, or university applications.

Sometimes it is a enough for a good slide deck to make a small difference in order to win the big prize. Take fund raising for example.

• A good slide deck gives you a slightly higher probability of getting through the email screen
• Better slides lift your confidence just a tiny bit when presenting
• When your presentation is better, you get more meetings, you get to practice more, your story gets better, you get more meetings

Even a small difference can have a big impact.

After the introduction presentation by venture capitalist Mark Suster, the people over at SalesCrunch are now starting to post the videos of my own NYU presentations online. Yesterday number 1 (out of 7) went up, and it provides a much needed audio track to my slightly cryptical slides.

The great people of SalesCrunch are beginning to put the videos from my New York presentations online. First up is Mark Suster, a well-known venture capitalist from LA who introduces my presentation on pitching VCs

Mark is one of the best VC bloggers around, and I was honored when he offered to introduce my presentation in New York in person. We found out the night before that we happened to be in the same city (it is a statistically low probability that 2 people from Tel Aviv and Los Angeles are at the same time in New York).

More videos to come. Thank you Ann Lupo for the video recording and editing.

When pitching VCs it is better to say “I don’t know” if you do not know the answer to a question than making something up that turns out to be wrong later. Management integrity is a more important investment criterion than having all facts readily accessible in your head.

Last week, I spoke at a SalesSchool event at NYU in New York. Here are the slides I used during the 2 evenings. Both presentations start off the same, but then diverge as they focus on VC pitches and sales meetings. SalesCrunch will post video fragments of the evenings later on their site.

At the end of the presentation, I touch briefly on the challenges of presenting without eye contact. For more suggestions about presenting remotely and in webinars, see this post by Olivia Mitchell.