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The quote from the Jerry Maguire movie. Some pitches go well. Maybe because the other side knows you, trusts you, knows the industry/competition well, and is ready to take things to the next step. No point in trying to pick up the pitch at page 15 with that very optimistic revenue forecast, and/or booting up that demo with potential bugs. That can happen in the next meeting.
The award ceremony of a piano competition builds up to the climax of announcing the #1. But keeping the suspense is not always right. In investor pitches, keeping your audience guessing what it is you actually do, is not a smart thing to do (previous post).
The other day I came across another situation where it did not really work. Email invitation: important org update during the weekly update call. So everyone expects the announcement of a promotion or departure of someone senior. Leave the anecdote, intro, buildup aside. Say what is happening in the first sentence, then provide compliments, congratulations, thank you’s.
Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash
So you got some feedback on your pitch deck: “You need to ‘hit them hard’ with your strongest points early in the presentation”
Ok, bring this to the front, bring that to the front, this the front as well. Hmmm, now we have a lot of pages at the front, maybe summarize all of these messages on the first page, then we get to all of them really early.
The result: a dense, boring bullet point page. And it will take you 20 minutes to go through it, since it contains the entire presentation.
Most investment ideas have very few ideas that are truly distinctive, or better phrased: ideas that do not sound like all the other pitches an investor listens to. Be very honest and selective. Often, you might have to deal with an “elephant in the room” early in the presentation. Addressing competition from Google if you are building an internet search engine on page 27 is not a smart idea.
Photo by Georgi Kalaydzhiev on Unsplash
A thought triggered by my recent attempts at refreshing my 1992 coding skills, learning how to ski, and expanding my musical abilities from keys to the guitar.
Acquiring knowledge can be relatively easy: after you see an animation for 2 seconds you understand why the Moon is facing the earth with exactly the same face for the past few million years. See it, and snap, it has been added to your understanding of the world.
In the world of presenting and design, we can also acquire knowledge: white space, eye contact, one message per slide, “snap” and move on, right? Not so fast, presenting and design are skills, and the only way to master a skill is actually doing it.
Eye balling your slides in a cafe and imagining how you are going to present them is one thing (‘here I will make the point that the competition will never be able to catch up’). Doing it on stage with a crackling microphone while being distracted by a question is different.
Dreaming up a slide is easy, but how do you get these numbers to round in the Excel chart, and how on earth do I incorporate that comment of the CEO in this chart that is already pretty full?
You know that you are getting somewhere with learning a skill when your brain starts to resist, that means that you are getting into new territory as you push it to make new neural connections. Most people give up here, but those who don’t will be surprised when they pick up things again after a night of sleep.
Upwork is a huge platform for buying and selling freelance services. I start seeing of lot posts and complaints about scams recently. My 2 cents as a freelancer (who is not on Upwork by the way).
Outsourcing work to freelancers can be incredibly valuable to companies, and creates a huge opportunity for employment including parts of the globe which are not downtown Manhattan. Over the past decade, I had many clients who were a bit nervous in the beginning to trusting a stranger 7 time hours ahead in time with their important presentation slides.
Platforms like Upwork can be helpful to match buyers and sellers, but the current effort to scale things up are taking it too far I think. Getting hundreds of applications for a small job, mechanistic monitoring (forced screenshots every 10 minutes), the whole thing just sounds wrong and is turning freelancers into the cog wheels pretty much like what happened in factories in the 19th century. If you try to make things efficient, stir price competition among suppliers, you get cheats, poor quality work, disputes.
If you want a $10 logo done in 24 hours, it will always be “a lottery”. The other approach is to look for a longer-term relationship, with potentially bigger projects. Take more time to get to know the freelancer, have a dialogue, check out previous work rather than star ratings generated by a system.
As the use of remote freelancers grows, the best way to find one might simply be the oldest: ask around among friends and/or colleagues, pretty much the same way you would find a piano teacher for your kid. The advantage over the piano teacher is that you now can engage designers anywhere in the world.
This blog post popped up in my Twitter feed the other day: SlideShare is no longer what it used to be.
I agree, personally, I do not use the service anymore, and a quick visit to today’s home page shows a stale site showcasing “today’s” top presentations that are 4 months old. I can still remember those annual presentation design competitions a couple of years ago that attracted a lot of attention.
In retrospect, SlideShare was a mix up of a lot of businesses:
The service was hindered by technical limitations: somehow the quality of played back presentations was not that high, and full of SlideShare branded links and content, which is why I moved away from the platform. Recently, SlideShare killed the re-upload feature that preserved back links and view counts. Also, the acquisition by LinkedIn which then got acquired by Microsoft did not help to focus management. And finally, there are lots of other platforms out there that can host clickable slides somehow. None of them have managed to attract crowds that SlideShare could assemble though.
Ultimately, there is a market for a SlideShare-like platform I believe. And now 10 years after SlideShare was founded the economics of running the platform (storing lots of media rich content) could be fundamentally different.
Entrepreneurs can get very excited sometimes: “This is amazing, that is amazing, this is better, that is better”. There is basically no single aspect where the product (concept) of their seed-stage startup does not completely destroy the competition with their existing solutions that somehow served the market for the past decade. Also, commercialisation is all but in the bag after we sign that one big corporate strategic partner next month. Even the smallest of questions / challenges by potential investors are met with a relentless pounding of counter arguments even before she finished making her point.
Investors like enthusiasm, but also value realism when it comes to taking an individual on board that will have to return part of not all, of their funds to their own investors. When it sounds too good to be true, there is probably something hiding somewhere. Venture investors take calculated risks. If your company is a 100% sure huge success, valuations would be sky high, but investor returns the same as government bonds.
Cover by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash
Cities are recycling their presentations to lure Amazon to put a new HQ there to pitches other candidates.
I see this many times, a company that needs to pull out all the stops to present at a major conference or pitch competition. Ideas and energy of that pitch are re-used numerous times in other presentations. It is often that wake up call to get your act together, take more creative risk to present your idea with “nothing to lose”.
There is a cost element to it as well. How can you get more return on that expensive video work? You need to try to find the balance between a personal and relevant pitch (rule #1 of sales presentations), and re-usable content. For videos, I usually request to have a clean version of the file without specific text banners or voice overs that cannot be separated. In that way you can re-use the assets for other projects.
Btw, these city pitches are very interesting. Here are 3 very different pitches. I think Detroit is the most inspiring. What do you think?
Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
A short summary of Mark Suster’s blog post where he argues that startups should send VCs the entire file, not a link:
What is a good deck for sending? Well, one that does not contain confidential information: product pipelines, salaries, etc. Assume that your competition will read the slides sooner or later, and there should be no harm when this happens. I have seen it on the other side with my clients, they would forward me a deck of a competitor and we would actually not get any info out of it, but rather admire that powerful pitch that the others created. So, it might actually be a benefit if your competitors see your slides :-)
Cover image by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash
I am dusting of my coding skills that were pretty much put on hold in the early 1990s and have started to program macros to automate the mechanics of the template store: creating individual slides and thumbnails for PowerPoint and Keynote in different aspect ratios of these design.
Things in the Microsoft Office ecosystem run smoothly (“VBA”), for Mac, a lot less so. Applescript is a language that aims to automate pretty much everything you can do in Mac OS. It has been around for a very long time, but it is falling short.
At first sight, the language looks very friendly, almost human-like. And here is a problem: human language is ambiguous. It is incredibly hard to use it to program computers. When I look at example Applescript code, it looks very easy to adjust and re-use, but it is an incredibly pain to get it actually working and iron out the last bugs. Writing macro scripts will never be something that the average Apple user will do, so you might as well stick to a programming language that an engineer can work with.
The second problem is the what Applescript can actually do. As Apple put development of Mac OS on the back burner and gave priority to its iOS devices, the functional power of Applescript has been watered down. Old tutorials online show functionality that has been removed in later versions of Keynote.
Now, I am not saying that all esoteric features should be supported in a scripting language, but I am struggling to get the most obvious and basic one that anyone wants to use a Keynote script for: batch conversion of PowerPoint files into Keynote.