SlideMagic Blog

If you are are a company shareholder, it is reassuring to see the shareholdings on the first or second page of the company presentation.

For everyone else, the shareholdings can go somewhere in the back.

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.

A post with 8 things you should not include in a pitch deck on TNW. My comments:

1. No detail, 20-30 slides. It depends. If your slides are really light and visual, you can go through a lot of them in 20 minutes. maybe more than 30. Depending on your situation, (some) detail can be good. Really high level pitches lack meat.
2. No contact information. No reason to overdo it, but an email or phone number on the last page does not harm I think. I do not like it when I cannot find a phone number at the bottom of an email.
3. Remove a point they can object to. Maybe, but if it is a major point, it has to go in. You cannot change reality… If this is a deal breaker, then this investor is not the right one for you.
4. Fund allocation. Yes, opening up criticism over your budget might not be smart. Still, an investor wants to know roughly what is going to happen with the funds, and why you need this money, now, and not in 6 months from now
5. Guestimates. Agree. If you have to make guestimates, make intelligent ones, and make it transparent that it is a guestimate
6. Unrealistic success prediction. Agree
7. Saying there is no competition, absolutely agree. Even if there is no direct competitor, there are other solutions, categories, that people are using to solve a particular problem
8. The “The End” slide, yes, you can take that one off, and replace it with a repeat of a strong visual earlier in the presentation. This is a nice backdrop against which to hold the Q&A discussion. The last slide is the slide that probably sits longest on the projector.