SlideMagic Blog

The Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger fell through. Fred Wilson makes the case that this is probably a good thing, not so much because of consumer choice, but on the other side of the business: content providers trying to get through to consumers with their offering (Netflix, etc.).

This article in the NYT provides some interesting background on the failed $25m lobbying and pitching effort. Some quotes:

“He was smothering us with attention but he was not answering our questions”

“And I could not help but think that this is a $140 billion company with 130 lobbyists — and they are using all of that to the best of their ability to get us to go along”

1. If there are elephants in the room, huge obvious issues that need to be addressed, you have to deal with them, somehow. Avoiding the issue will not make the issue go away.

2. Beyond a certain point, “slick” is actually working against you, when you try to convince a human. (The same point I made with respect to highly sophisticated videos).

Art: The colossus, Francisco de Goya, 1808–1812

The economics of most Internet startups are sort of the same. You invest CAC (customer acquisition cost per user), you convert the free user to a paying user (conversion rate), and you hope she sticks around long enough (churn rate) to get a decent LTV (customer life time value). With a decent growth rate, you have a good business.

Seasoned venture capitalists are tempted to dive straight into these figures and skip the bit what your business is all about. I would encourage you not to give in. It is important to establish that emotional connection with the problem you are trying to solve, how great your product is.

In the end, they will be investing in a business that consists of people and users, not just a spreadsheet that delivers LTV-CAC.

Art: Jean Honore Fragonard, The Love Letter, 1770.

Should you bend the truth to make your investor pitch more attractive? Answer: no.

• Some investors will find out in the meeting, they might have seen a lot of companies similar to yours and spot an inconsistency quickly by asking a few smart questions
• Most investors will find out in meeting #2 when you open up the books of the company
• The biggest reason not to: your personal brand. Integrity issues is an absolute no-go for investors (they are evaluating you as a trusted long-term business partner). And word of a tarnished personal brand is likely to stick with you beyond this fund raising round.

Should you put out all your weaknesses for everyone to see? Of course not. Tell when asked. Think about how to visualise data. Leave facts that require an elaborate explanation out of the cold email deck, you should be in the room with the investor when it comes up.

Trust is a big asset, don’t waste it.

Art: Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde The bend in the Herengracht, Amsterdam, 1685

You show your deck to 10 people, you get 10 different sets of feedback. Feedback is useful, but you have to make the call to whom to listen, and whom to ignore. People have different backgrounds. Experts, colleagues, and insiders give different feedback than your close family. Listen more carefully to feedback from people that resemble your target audience before putting all your fundamental charts in the appendix.

The more often you give a presentation, the more you start developing your own flow. When you reach a stage where you can deliver a pitch without going back and forth between slides, and are not getting audience questions you were about to answer 3 slides later, you probably got it right. Even if people walk up to you afterwards and suggest to collapse a few slides into one to reduce the slide count.

Art: Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874

Someone who hears a story for the first time needs to create the whole picture in her head from scratch. Give background, introduction, examples, then bring it all together.

People who have heard the story millions of times before, check your presentation against their existing mental picture. Summary upfront, neatly structured, logical.

Presentation designers fall in the second category, while most of your audience is in the first. Think about that.

Art: Gustav Klimt, Beech Grove

On my desk I use 3 monitors: 2 big 27" screens and my laptop screen. While it is tempting to put all your live Twitter, Facebook, and email feeds blinking on the left and right screen, I keep them blank most of the time (well, that is a good use of the monitor) to minimise distraction.

I use them when I need a little extra desk space for a slide I am working on: a previous version of a presentation with comments, comments in email, the Finder window with images, a spreadsheet to copy data from. As soon as I am done with that, I close the window with only the wallpaper left.

In a recent software update, Apple has added a new feature: right-click an icon in the dock, click options, and you can now select the default screen the application will open. I set the default for all my smaller utilities (1Password, Evernote, the Finder window) to the small laptop screen.

Art: Gustave Caillebotte, Young man at his window, 1875

The video in which Hillary Clinton announced her intention to run for President is too well executed. The messages are incredibly clear, you can almost reverse engineer the PowerPoint slide that contained the briefing bullet points for the script.

But the execution is also staged and lacking raw emotion that it is unlikely to resonate with voters. I don’t think it will leave a negative impression, just a neutral one. It sounds and looks like almost all advertising we see around us. This review on the Huffington Post captures it correctly.

In a similar way, Apple product videos, once admired, now almost look funny after the many parodies.

A better way to do this? Interview “real people” on camera. It is a lot harder to do though.

It is a warning sign for those who think that big budget productions (videos, presentations) automatically translate into audience impact. The more people have been disappointed by slick presentations, photoshopped ads, spectacular videos, the harder it is to convince them that in your case they should believe you.

P.S. What do I think about the campaign logo? I don’t think it is very pretty, but it will be very recognisable as an avatar on social media sites. Functional.

Art: The Peacemakers (1868) painting by George P.A. Healy.

Often, when I meet a high tech client, I get presented with an existing company presentation that contains all the required information but conceals the big idea behind the company. As a result, we usually push the slides away and start talking, and after a few minutes, that big idea comes out.

First versions of the redesigned presentations are all about that big idea. It is in your face. But there is a risk that over time we start diluting that pure story again. The world out there (and Gartner and IDC reports) are used to defining the technology world in certain boxes, using certain language. And as we get a lot of questions about how you compare to this, to that, we slowly, slowly, get back to a presentation that resembles the one we started of with. It looks prettier, but the big idea is hidden again.

My (and your responsibility) is to prevent that from happening.

Art: RMS Olympic in dazzle at Halifax, Nova Scotia painted by Arthur Lismer

My startup clients who have customers/sales and are raising a follow-on investment round are swimming in data. Every click, of every customer segment, at any time is recorded and can be analysed. How to use this in an investor pitch?

• Standard metrics. Some investors are highly specialised professionals who can X-ray an internet startup by analysing just a few statistics (comparing them to the other 500 startups they have seen). Google what the metrics are for your type of business, or even better scrutinise blog posts by a particular VC to see what she is really focussed on.
• Your own metrics. Before even getting into the data, understand what really makes your business tick. Back in the good old days at McKinsey, we used to spend months at this for big corporates. Customer acquisition cost, churn, repeat purchase, basket size, etc. etc. Which driver has an impact on your business, and which can you influence. Is your business national or even global (SlideMagic), or has it more of a city-by-city regional character (Uber). Once you figured out your metrics, write the entire financial section around those.
• Anticipate the obvious questions. Be one step ahead and anticipate the obvious questions. If your chart shows a dip in February, you can guess the question that is coming. If Vancouver lags behind Portland, guess what a VC is going to ask. Have answers before the meeting start and/or show the data in a different way if these hick ups are minor distractions and not key drivers of your business. And a question by one VC in a meeting does not mean that it merits rewriting the whole pitch around that for your next meeting. Within infinite amounts of data, there are an infinite number of questions, but we only have a finite amount of time.

Most American newspapers use title capitalisation in their headlines: Every Important Word is Written with a Capital. Should you do the same in presentations?

My opinion: no, I think it does not look very good. The only exception: titles of books or research papers you are quoting as a source in the footnote.

Art: Edwaert Collier, Still Life, 1696