SlideMagic Blog

Startup competitions are different from regular investor pitches. Your are on stage to deliver a show to a crowd, not to a VC partner group. The jury members do not have to put their money where their mouth is. I asked a recent jury member for such an event to list feedback on investor presentations from the top of her head, without too much thinking. Here is the raw result:

• Have someone speak who masters the language. This is a back-to-back show, and if all candidates speak fluently, the one who does not will stand out negatively.
• Personality, attitude, enthusiasm, passion are far more important than professionally crafted slides.
• If you have to send a very junior team member to present, because the you, the CEO, has better things to do than to attend the startup competition, it is probably better not to show up at all.
• Contradicting myself, a presentation by (recorded) video was received remarkably well.

Startup competitions might suit some startups better than others. Things that score points for a big crowd: an unusual, non-typical, entrepreneur; an impact/green/environmental/healthcare-related company objective, a market that a non-technical audience can relate to, etc. etc.

When preparing for a startup pitch event, customize your slides and story and don’t bring your standard investor pitch to the event.

Professional communication is getting more efficient, informal, and to the point. Long memos, turn into emails, turn into quick messages. Polite greetings that used to be the protocol in letters are left out.

In certain settings, the formalities of the past are still present. The dinner speech for example. We look back at the past year, summarise our achievements, thank everyone involved. A good speech can be inspiring and a joy to listen to. It can be great to see someone get the thank you she deserves.

A routine speech is boring though: running through a long list of names, waiting for a round of applause for each one of them, becoming softer and softer as the we read down the piece of paper. The audience is polite, but is probably secretly hoping for the thing to be over, and/or, curious to hear what the real news is that is coming at the end of the talk.

When writing an update email (or update-presentation-attachment), the politeness is no longer required, you no longer have a captive audience. People speed read through your paragraphs to the things that really matter.

Keep that in mind when writing it. Make the things that matter stand out. Make that thank you that you really mean stand out.

Here is a very common presentation scenario. You have a good relationship with a middle manager in a potential client, and she meets the CEO next week and could take “a few slides” with her in her briefcase for a 30 second pitch.

What not to do? Send your full 30 minute pitch deck that you have used in so many successful Zoom meetings before. Especially that slide with just a golf ball on a green lawn always drives your point home.

You are not presenting, your friend does, and you don’t have 30 minutes, you have 30 seconds. But this might be good news. Thirty seconds of your friend with the CEO, is a better shot than 10 minutes with a purchasing officer who you do not know.

What to do?

Take the time to explain to your friend what it is you do, and then make a “placeholder” slide that she can use to give the pitch. It is not possible to go through a slide deck in 30 seconds, so the pitch is basically a verbal one. Your placeholder should look nice, and actually not distract too much so that the CEO can keep her focus on the audio track. (Typos, calculation errors….)

You need to rely on your friend to do the pitch, but you need to compensate for the fact that you are not in the room, nor on the Zoom screen to give the CEO the opportunity to use her intuition to answer the “who are these people?” Question. A CV/bio type slide with a picture could do the trick (again a placeholder) , “hey they also went to INSEAD…”.

A boxy table caught my eye on Twitter:

The biggest flaw in this table is the White House line, that suggests a separate group of people. Then, you can shift the columns around a bit, until you get this result:

Automation is likely to take out a large share of middle-level jobs in the economy. Gardners, hairdressers, etc. will always be needed. Top scientists, managers, creatives, probably will not be automated anytime soon. In between, it is a different story.

“Automation” has made its inroad in the workplace as well. Most visibly in the area of storage and filing. But also in the way we work. Think of the amount of people that were employed typing up formal documents and memos, planning meetings, arranging phone calls. Back in the 1990s, running analysis on your business required armies of analysts, often sourced from external consulting firms (I was one of them).

The same trend is happening in presentations. Back in the 1990s, we would discuss interim project results using hand drawn charts, that then would be produced by professional graphics designers into a final document. The production of such a document could take weeks, where the sole focus was one communication, and the underlying analysis barely moved.

Bit by bit, the professional designers were replaced by analysts skipping the hand drawn charts and making them directly on their computers. Analysts first, followed by more senior staff. Every meeting now looked like a final presentation.

The trend will continue. “Presentations” will become simpler and quicker to make. In 10 years we will look back and remember the days when we used to spend so much time trying to put a complicated slide deck together for a simple decision.

SlideMagic is here to help.

It can take a lot of time to get your presentation slide just right. However, once you got to that point, it should be super quick to recreate it. You can call this a ‘live test’. Take pen/paper, or open SlideMagic, and create the chart on the fly while someone is watching and listening. “We have 3 options, each has distinct pros and cons, I think number 2 is the best one”. If you are struggling to do this quickly and in a logical flow, your chart is probably too complex to be understood by a live audience. This is similar to a school teacher using the blackboard in the proper way.

I just returned from a short trip to Paris to show my son around some of the famous sites and restaurants. In 2021, that means a lot of health checks and tests. I was probably the only one in the airline terminal that looked at all the forms with the eye of a typographer.

I am not talking about elegance here, pure functionality. The people at check in desks are looking for “positive” or “negative”, the date the test was given, and whether the passport numbers match. On the test result form, the thing that is printed biggest is the name of the testing laboratory…

All this can be fixed easily with an adjustment of font sizes.

Very often, after you created that data chart that you thought drives the point home, you change the headline with an even more powerful statement. In those cases, consider changing the entire data chart…

The above can also be show this way:

Giving a demo of your application or web site to an investor or potential partner is different from teaching a new user how to use it by herself.

For the user:

• Where do all the buttons sit
• How to log in
• How to update settings
• Where to find your account details
• How to create a project from scratch
• Etc.

For the investor / partner:

• What does the app do?
• Show me a walk through of a “story” or use case
• Have a project ready to show
• Look, there is actually a piece of software that is working…
• Etc.

In presentations, you are most likely to deal with scenario 2. Do all the prep work (logging in etc.), and design a very clear script of what you want to show, cutting out any tangents and other delays. Keep it short and focused. Rehearse your walk through, and as a backup, have a series of consecutive screenshots ready just in case Murphy’s law kicks in.

How to round numbers in a data chart? It depends. The chart below does not look very appealing

The numbers are hard to read. This chart can serve 2 purposes. Either show the trend in sales, or show the exact sales figures. To show a trend in sales, simply show the accounts in thousands, and round up to one decimal point:

If you need to provide the actual precise sales data (for accounting or tax purposes), put it in an appendix slide that does not even pretend to show a trend: