Skipping the presenter mode

Presentation software like PowerPoint or SlideMagic have 2 modes: one for slide editing, and one for showing the presentation to an audience. In video calls, I often see the presenter leaving the presentation in edit mode. The slide is visible, but with all the edit controls around, plus grid lines and other markings. On the side is a list of thumbnails of all the slides in the presentation. For the presenter, this can be handy. She knows the deck in and out and can quickly jump around the slides.

For the audience it is confusing.

• The slide in edit mode looks unfinished.

• Often the thumbnails on the left are so big that you could actually read them, distracting attention away from the main slide.

In SlideMagic, presentation view creates 2 separate windows: one for the slide to be shown to the audience, one with the controls for the presenter. So in Zoom, or other video conference tools, you can share just the slide, while staying in full control of the presentation in a window that is not visible to the audience.

"The hidden benefits of stage fright"

A nice video by Adam Neely who talks about stage fright from a musician’s perpsective:

The excitement indicator

You probably have a generic pitch deck that you have been using over and over again. You eyeball the slides before emailing to yet another potential client or investor. If you have given this presentation a thousand times, it is worth to have a look at each slide and ask yourself the question, are you excited to present it, do you want to surprise the audience with this unexpected insight?

If the answer is “yes”, keep it in, if not, considering taking it out. Here are examples of slides that can provoke a luke warm response…

• Repetitions. You have already explained on slide 4 that “X” was a major issue, and now on slide 14, you introduce your product feature that kills this issue. No need to explain that issue again, and you probably notice that in your presentation you tend to apologize for this slide: “ah, yes, as I said before…”

• Feature check lists. If your products has all the standard features that are expected from an offering in this product category, there is no need to walk through each single one of them. You are probably dreading having to go through these 5 slides (here is the user profile, here is the contact book, etc. etc.)

• Historical baggage. In the early days, talking about your company foundation used to be really exciting. Now, 5 years later, that slide has become sort of dense, and the opening of the new office 3 months ago does not really add anything to the story anymore.

Keep things exciting and fresh!

Presenting for the phone camera

Over the past 2 weeks I have visited 2 large conferences in the fields of software and healthcare (apologies for the lower posting frequency here). During the latter, I witnessed something I have not really seen before: the presentation for the phone camera.

Companies get 13 minute presentation slots which are filled with sequences of slides loaded with scientific data. The presenter flicks through them at super high speed, I could barely read their headlines.

The audience does not seem to mind. Each slide is captured with a smartphone camera and saved for viewing later, back in the office. The more data on a drug’s efficacy and safety the better. Large pharma companies seeking to buy molecules, competitors wanting to check in on the market, countries seeking inspiration for their own research, and investors wondering where to invest their money are totally happy with the approach.

Zelensky changes world leaders' minds in a 5 minute video call

A very interesting background story in the Washington Post how Zelensky changed seasoned politicians’ minds in a 5 minute video call

After a perfunctory debate, the presidents and prime ministers quickly approved sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and some of Russia’s biggest banks. Talk of barring Russia from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, however, stalled amid skepticism on the part of Scholz and the leaders of Austria, Italy and Cyprus, according to officials familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.

Then Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dialed into the meeting via teleconference with a bracing appeal that left some of the world-weary politicians with watery eyes. In just five minutes, Zelensky — speaking from the battlefield of Kyiv — pleaded with European leaders for an honest assessment of his country’s ambition to join the European Union and for genuine help in its fight with the Russian invaders. Ukraine needed its neighbors to step up with food, ammunition, fuel, sanctions, all of it.

“It was extremely, extremely emotional,” said a European official briefed on the call. “He was essentially saying, ‘Look, we are here dying for European ideals.’” Before ending the video call, Zelensky told the gathering matter-of-factly that it might be the last time they saw him alive, according to a senior European official who was present.

We can all learn from a presenter like this.

Tape vs disk

Exactly my view as well:

This is why I actively dislike most videos and podcasts, especially if I'm trying to be informed, as opposed to entertained.

— Paola Bonomo (@LivePaola) February 14, 2022

Videos and podcasts are sequential tapes, text is a hard disk where you can access specific sections instantly. The first is great for a story, the latter is better for a quick reference.

Think about this for your pitch presentation as well, both have different advantages

• A short introduction video (sequential):

  • Gives a glimpse of who you are as a person/CEO, especially useful in the absence of personal meetings

  • Enables you to re-record your elevator pitch until you get it absolutely right, live presentations are a one-shot game

  • Eliminates storyline hiccups and tangents that you might not spot when shuffling slides in a deck.

• A short pitch deck:

  • Is the “graphical business card” of your idea, the look and feel

  • Enables people to skip through your story very quickly, especially useful for investors who are deeply specialized in a particular field

  • Allows quick repeat access to reference slides: key metrics, team bios, current investor profiles, etc.

  • Can be viewed on mobile devices on the go without the need for audio

Audience - stage (mis)match

The COVID pandemic has put big performances with live audiences on hold. Some companies continue to produce them: big sets, with spectacular music, light effects, and eager presentation hosts, just without the audience. A good example are the launches of the new 2022 Formula 1 race cars that are happening now. Big drum rolls, no audience. The space in which the presenters are sitting (huge production hall), and in which the audience is viewing (small room) do not match.

The opposite is true for a number of YouTubers that have moved beyond the ‘kitchen studio’. For example: online guitar teachers. They create a simple but highly professional video background environment by carefully selecting objects and lighting. The result is a setting that matches that of the audience. You are sort of sitting in the same room.

The anchorman in the days of Zoom

Up until the early 2000s, TV programs in The Netherlands would be announced by an ‘anchorman’, often a woman (Dutch people can refresh their memory here).

I was reminded of them by watching a number of high schools pitching themselves to my son via Zoom. Some schools had a fully prepared introduction video, linked by a pre-recorded ‘anchorman’. Others had a live anchorman that connected the various videos together.

The latter approach worked much better in my opinion, creating a stronger bond with the audience. But you got to rehearse that switching between anchorman, slide show, and video stream though. In the 1980s, this was the job of the TV control room…

The... ...prof... ...writes... ...the... ....point...

Academics and other teachers like to write out their points in full sentences on black boards, so that students can copy them in their notebooks. This could actually be useful, the slowly spoken sentence, combined with the hand writing, gets burnt in memory easier. Also, that sentence becomes a sort of mental placeholder on the big collection of black boards. To refer back to it, you can simply circle the sentence, and the text itself reminds the audience what is meant, but more importantly, it is that “geographic location” of memories around that sentence that creates the right context.

As I ‘sat' through’ a 1.5 hour video on encryption technology of an academic lecture last week, the teacher took it to the extreme though: not making his big point before starting to write it down…. “That… makes… it….”, what will it be “possible” or “impossible”?

I would pop the suspense, before writing things down…

The interviewer who wants you to shine

Unless you are a politician, powerful CEO, or another controversial person, most interviewers for podcast, video interviews, TV interviews, conference panels probably want you to shine on stage. She is likely a media pro, you are not appearing on screen every day.

A good interviewer has a little chat with you before the show, gets a quick ideas of the interesting points you can share with the audience, and then will proceed to give you the best possible setup question to tell your story.

In this friendly environment, you can patiently wait for the question to finish, and deliver the punch line that you might have practiced before (practice it a lot in order to be spontaneous). No need to jump in early, deviate from the question, or be surprised because you did not see the question coming and need to think about the answer after you started answering the question.

In some sales or investor pitches, the role of this friendly interviewer might be the person you convinced of your story, and now needs to sell it to her superiors. Help her out if you can.

The brain is predicting

Here is an interesting article about how our mind works. The brain is constantly predicting impressions to save energy. It has a number of layers. A higher layer creates a prediction based o a lower layer. The lower layer can report inconsistencies to the layer above, in case we can go a level deeper.

This is probably the same mechanism that intuition uses, as long as we observe something that is in lie with our prediction, we maintain low energy mode, if things start moving apart, we add brain power.

Remember that this is how an audience will be looking at you when presenting.

On-screen app demos

I just went through a live on-screen application demo, some things I learned, some things I knew already.

• If the meeting is very short, consider doing a demo using screenshots on slides. This prevents losing time in technology glitches and the less interesting part of your app (logging in etc.). Have a live version of your app running on your machine as a proof that the real things is there.

• Rehearse the exact scenario you will be running. Which demo users will log in, what will they do, in what sequence. Again, this will eliminate technical issues, but also makes sure your story fits with the overall pitch (no dead ends, no duplications, repetition of things you already explained using slides).

• Make sure that the app looks right. For some apps, this is a full screen rendering on a very large monitor, for other apps this might be rendering of your app on a smaller screen on the big monitor. In the latter scenario, remove visual distractions from your laptop desktop.

• Pay attention to the details of your demo environment. Add avatars for your demo users that fit nicely with your app colors. Fill out optional text (even with lorem ipsum) that might not be crucial to your app, but make the whole screen look more balanced.

• Laptop track pads feel strange when you have to look at a giant monitor at the other end of the room. Consider bringing a mouse so you can ignore your laptop all together, or mirror your screen.

• Pay attention to your monitor configuration when using dual screens. If the big screen is to your right, make sure your computer thinks it is there as well. Every time you have to “think” where your mouse is, you take your attention away from the pitch.

• Think of your “background screen”, what is the view of the app you want to be sitting on the monitor when the demo is not really running. A blank login screen, or a blinking cursor of your localhost server does not do much to pitch your app…

Update email versus update speech

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.

In the briefcase

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…”.

Finally think of a very specific next step that can move the process further. You are unlikely to land an investment in 30 seconds, you could get an actual Zoom meeting though…

Good luck.

The live test

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.

Winging it

“Winging” a presentation, making it up on the spot, is extremely hard, and I would say, impossible. All people that seem to get up on stage and deliver a perfect pitch without any effort have in fact been rehearsing this over and over and over. (The previous instances where they pulled off the same trick). You need to practice really hard to be spontaneous.

When you look at a piece of paper with the scribbles of your thoughts, it seems like you have it all in your head. Everything is there. But standing in front of an audience is different. Your eyes are moving quickly across the piece of paper, going back and forth if relationships are not clear. With speaking, there is no rewind option. You need to build that “visual” in people’s minds step by step.

Many things can go wrong here:

• You forgot the exact sequence of your points and you realize it too late, now you are stuck without a way to go back

• You get distracted and are not sure where to pick things up, as you try to get your thoughts together, you repeat a few things you already said

• You delivered that powerful punch line too early and now your speech ends with a mumbling “well, that’s it, thank you”

Don’t wing your pitch.

Image by ŠJů, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Presentation Zen on YouTube

Garr Reynolds was the first presentation blogger in the world back in the mid 2000s. His book “Presentation Zen” is still the standard introduction into the world of presentation design. His blog has gone quiet over the past years, but recently Garr has been active on YouTube covering among other things how to improve your Zoom presentations. Garr might no longer be in your RSS reader, but it is worth adding him to your YouTube subscriptions.

This is emotion in a presentation

The former head of the US gun lobby was tricked into rehearsing a graduation speech in front of 3000+ empty chairs. The event was fake and the chairs represented the number of high school victims of gun violence.

Whether you are in favor or against guns, the visuals of drone going over the audience with the voice in the background make an impression.

In the comments below each of the posting of the video you see the hard core pro and con camps engaging in typical uncivilized internet debating.

I think adding the sounds of gunshots and 911 calls was actually not needed at all, the effect of the video might have been better without them. It is the doubters, the ones that are sitting on the fence, who the video needs to influence. Most anti gun media has lots of noise, graphic images, and violence which might not be the right influencing strategy for the middle group. People discount it, tune out, and it sets up everyone for that heated debate that polarizes even more.

The "business side"

There is a strong divide between “tech people” and “business people” in startups. Usually people start in “tech” and then move on to “business”. Tech people usually do not want to get into anything “business” and/or pretend not to understand “business”.

Maybe all of this goes back to high school / university where the introvert technology student never was accepted in the extrovert world of fraternities. Later on their careers they were just amazed by all these people that knew all these important sounding concepts and knew exactly what to say in meetings.

Having made the unusual reverse path from “business” to “tech” some advice:

• Yes, every technical founder actually needs to understand a few basics of business. It is like having some proficiency in English, know how to ride a bike, drive a car. It is essential in “business” but also in your personal life.

  • Being able to understand a financial statement: P&L, assets, liabilities, equity, debt, cash flows. It is not hard at all. What matters is not so much the technical terms, but the general approach and philosophy behind it.

  • Understanding the basics of law: agreements, liability, ownership. A tiny 2 month course in engineering school I did was probably one of the most important subjects I took on.

• Ignore and don’t be intimidated by any sophisticated sounding buzzword or concept, if you don’t understand it, ask what it means, or Google the term and you will be surprised how quickly the bubble pops. This is the equivalent of “tech” people claiming their server supports AI-driven cache invalidation (Business people: this does not make sense).

• Every one can make a pitch or tell a story. Your “tech” background does not automatically imply that you should give the pen to someone else. The flip side of this though is that you should invest time and effort in it, rather than using your background as an excuse not to bother.

• A career path that start in “tech” does not necessarily have to end in “business”. “Business” is not more important than “tech”. People often confuse “management” with “business”. Some people like running things (management) and that career is measured by how many people report to you, and/or what amount of revenue your are responsible for. There are other careers in “business” where managing people is less important.

Don’t be afraid of the “business side”.

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

Which meetings work remote, which don't

An interesting perspective from AVC:

1. Three-hour internal strategy session with VC partners worked great in person

2. Shorter follow-on investment decision meeting with Singapore-based startup worked great remote

I think we will get smarter which meetings work remote and which ones don’t.

Why does meeting type 1 work in person?

• People are in the same location anyway, and can all be in the same room (no “zooming in”)

• A great setting to bounce off ideas between people who know each other well, have worked with each other for a long time,

• That meeting required a significant amount of time to go through things (3 hours on Zoom… no). Also the relative cost of a commute for a 3 hour meeting is lower, than spending the same time in traffic for a 30 minute chat.

• The type of interactions in this meeting are probably “messy”: lots of n-to-n question, answers and discussions. (Unlike a 1 to n presentation with a few specific questions)

• It depends on personality: extroverts love to go back to long in-person problem solving sessions, introverts might not

Meeting 2 is the opposite:

• 1 to n presentation with Q&A

• Predictable content and questions to cover

• The meeting was shorter, and maybe stacked with other similar type meetings.

• And the obvious one: people were a continent apart, and the meeting (or even a call) might not have happened if it weren’t for Zoom.

The short pitch via Zoom (even if you are close physically) has opened up a real new way to connect. In a call investors can’t really size up the team. With this uncertainty, a full meeting with filled with small talk and other logistics is too expensive and will not happen. The Zoom call fits right in between.

So different type of meetings, different type of format.

Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash