SlideMagic Blog

CEOs are banning PowerPoint presentations from meetings to improve company culture:

Bad presentations are bad for company culture. And boring the audience is just one aspect of this. People forget the other ones:

• People waste incredible amounts of time editing footnotes in slides, time that could have been spent much better
• Presentations are used to keep subordinates busy and under pressure by requesting zillions of updates to the slide deck by 9AM
• Company management is now mainly suggested slide edits ("cut it to 5 slides’) in emails that go up and down the corporate hierarchy

Presentation documents have become the language that corporate management uses to agree on ideas, and it is a pretty inefficient one. It is time for a change. I don’t think completely banning visuals in meetings will solve the issue. A better alternative is to ask employees to use a super simple presentation tool to back up their pitch to colleagues and I am working on that.

Most people amass a huge library of PowerPoint and Keynote slides on their computers. File search as a tool to find presentations is collapsing under the load, and searching for a specific slide inside a presentation is impossible. Most people are now using their email program as a document archive (“where is that deck I sent Sally last week?”).

BitLasso’s Reveal is a new program that aims to solve this issue. After installation it builds a database of all your slides and makes them searchable by keywords. The first try is very impressive, you use a specific topic that you still remember from a long time ago, and pop: there are the slides!

Slides are grouped together if they are similar (with yellow highlighting the differences), you can group them by date, by title. It all works brilliantly.

As a graphic design nitpicker, I noticed that fonts are not rendered correctly. But, remember this is a search tool, not a presentation application.

For the average user, this tool works great. For me, a professional presentation designer who has an incredibly large slide library with presentation for many, many, clients there is still a problem. Common business search terms will return so many slides that it is still hard to find the one you need. This is not a problem of the software though, more a result of my profession.

One suggestion could be to allow the search results to be grouped by some sort of directory, or limit the search inside a specific directory, since most users will have a basic level of organization by project on their hard drive to focus the search.

Most business presentations present conclusions. You did a ton of analysis, and now you take people through the data and their implications, often using the same slides the team used to get to those conclusions. “Look, here is what we did!”

Now, take it one step further, and tell what needs to happen next and why pretty much in the same way as you would talk to someone informally at the water cooler. What needs to happen, and why. Make slides that support exactly that, and attach the “look, here is what we did!” pack as appendix to that document.

Image via Add Letters

Here is a story flow that I end up using often for investor pitches of my clients:

• Good idea
  • Once, there was a situation
  • Something changes/changed
  • This creates an opportunity/problem
  • It’s not easy to solve it
  • Enter [company]
  • It’s clever
  • It’s different from the competition and alternatives
• Good business
  • Market: lots of (potential) users
  • Market: lots of dollars
  • Profitable: Unit economics work, company economics work (when company reaches scale)
• Good startup business
  • Product/feature pipeline is doable
  • Sales & marketing strategy is doable
• Good company
  • Team knows what they are doing
  • Traction shows that things are gaining momentum
• Good deal (often not covered in a presentation)
  • Board configuration
  • Deal terms

This video of a TED talk parody was uploaded a couple of months ago and I missed somehow. Yes, it is a parody, but in the between the lines (the content is non-existent) it actually shows how body language, pausing and pacing can give you a better stage presence.

WebSummit was full of them. Apparently, there are 5 PR people for every journalist on earth. Each journalists in the tech world receives about 200 emails, pitches, stories per day. I listened to a panel with PR people and journalists discussing thing with each other. Here are my impressions partly driven by what they said, partly what I read between the lines.

Your product is actually not that interesting to them. Two hundred products per day, lots of copy cats (“Uber for X”). I actually think journalists don’t have time, take the time to understand a technology, and hence don’t find it interesting and/or write about it. It takes me a good 45 minutes to understand a company well, a journalist does not have that time, the reader does not have that time, and most journalists don’t have an engineering background.

Big milestones are actually not that interesting anymore. Everyone raises $100m at a $1b valuation.

Other aspects of “your story” (becomes a buzzword) are more interesting. Did you come from an unusual background, does your company have some sort of social, environmental purpose (primary, or a side effect).

Do you actually need to be in a major Silicon Valley tech publication? If your target customers are in those circles, then yes. Maybe if you need to those “featured in” logos on your web page to strengthen your pitch to SV investors, yes. But otherwise, maybe spend your time and effort somewhere else.

“Social media” is becoming crowded and busy as well. With so many people creating noise, it actually boils down to a product that people want to use and talk about to their friends. Not so much social media, more building a great product.

In one of the panels at WebSummit, a participant made a number of mistakes:

• She mentioned the One Dollar Shave Club video
• She went on to explain that the One Dollar Shave Club sold their first batch of inventory straight after the video went viral (“can you believe it?”)
• She went on to explain that the  One Dollar Shave Club was acquired for (“how much was it again?”) one billion dollar for only hundred million dollar in sales

That was 2 minutes (be brief on panels) of a panel full of tech geeks who know this story (know your audience) with a hard to achieve advice: make your startup story as good as the One Dollar Shave Club video (the video, not the product).

When you start to mention a stale case example, and show that you are going to spend time explaining it, the audience knows what will follow in the next 5 minutes and you lost them. (The as an audience arriving at the bottom of a bullet point chart reading before you even finished reading out bullet point one aloud.

If you were not the first YouTube viewer who noticed the One Dollar Shave Club video an hour before you speak, use a more personal, original, case example. It is a great video though…

I set through a panel with partners from incubator/investor Y Combinator today here at WebSummit in Lisbon. The topic was about which advice is useful, which not, partly in the context of fund raising. Startup CEOs get bombarded with advice, while almost all advice sounds credible, not all the people who are given you advice (prompted, or unprompted) know what they are talking about.

As panels go, there was a lot of “noise” but these guys had a few pretty good points. Advice from these type of people might help you:

• People that have just done something that you are about to do, try to lift yourself up to the next level. They raised series A, you are getting ready for that round as your Seed funding dries up.
• People who have done that very recently and have “fresh” knowledge. The shelf life of advice is pretty short: technology moves on, the fund raising market develops, etc. etc.

Keep it in mind when someone critiques or praises your slides.

One client told me the other day that a later-stage investor was interested in investing in his company, and the main interaction was with a relatively junior analyst who kept on asking questions about the numbers in the business plan, rather than probing the quality of the technology.

This can mean 2 things:

• The best way to present to late-stage investment fund focus most of the time on presenting growth assumptions to the junior analyst
• The company went more or less through the full due diligence of the company, they (think they) understand the main strengths and weaknesses of the technology, what is left to be done is stabilize the numbers in the valuation model.

Option 2 is probably more likely. Although they keep on asking for numbers, does not mean that the overall story and context is not important.

I use visuals for presentations in 2 ways. One is the obvious use: put visuals on slides (duh). The other one is actually to design the story of the presentation.

Very often, pitches are about why something is better, why existing solutions don’t work, why the market is focussed on yesterday’s problems. I create a diagram for myself to create some sort of map where I can put all the elements, comparisons, and movements of a story. It starts simple, then gets really messy and complicated, then gets simplified again.

With that little piece of paper I go back to the slides of the presentation, and it is highly unlikely that my sketch visual and the visuals in the presentation have any similarity.

Image from WikiPedia