It is a bad idea to bend the truth in investor communications. Alternative reality might get you the attention in the first deck screening (or that initial bump in the share price), but things will come crashing down if you cannot deliver on your “mortgage” towards the future. The value of your business gets reset to where it should be, but also, your own personal credibility just got a big blow, creating a negative impact for your current idea and everything you are planning to do in the rest of your career.

Sometimes the truth bending might not be intentional. A marketing person in a pharma company might say/believe that we have “phase 2 data”, when in fact the company has “phase 2 preliminary data”. It sounds the same, but makes a huge difference in how investors evaluate a pharma business. Pay attention to detail where it matters.

Try keeping your presentation honest without:

• Actually amplifying your weakness… There is a middle ground between hiding the truth and putting it on the cover page. In the latter scenario you will score a lot of points for honesty, but investors will doubt your ability to communicate with investors and clients

• Let lawyers take over your slide and fill it with disclaimers, it just becomes background noise (think of the Fortune 500 CFO reading the legal disclaimers while journalists walk into the auditorium for the analyst presentation).

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