I get a lot of queries from startups on a tight budget that want the best presentation possible to raise their next round of financing that pretty much determines the survival of the company. Many of these projects I actually turn down when I see that the presentation is actually pretty decent. Extracting fees for a bespoke presentation design will not give them the right return on investment.

Here are some things I watch out for when deciding when a presentation is pretty decent for an early-stage VC round (which is a different audience than a major late-stage growth round, a TED talk, a pitch to a major customer)

• The slides have a decent look and feel: consistent, large font sizes, different colours than the standard PowerPoint colour theme
• It is almost instantly clear what it is that you are actually doing
• It is very clear why the company is different from what is out there, and/or why the particular innovation is so hard to do/hard to copy
• The presentation does not contain buzzwords, empty, hollow language and/or other padding
• The presentation has a sense of realism to it, forecasts and plans are ambitious, but not crazy, you see that the presentation is written by sensible people

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