I can only explain it in 45 minutes...

I often get this issue in client discussions. So we start out, and in that first meeting, it often turns out that the client can explain it in 5 to 10 minutes. The difference? Me impolitely interrupting monologues where I got the point already, and asking questions inviting conversation about issues that are not covered.

How to do it without the help of a probing presentation designer? Take a radical approach to how much time you spend on each element of your story. If a certain section is incredibly important, but at the same time totally obvious, old news, and well known, cut it to the minimum. On the other hand there might be a tiny detail that is completely counter intuitive and merits a total 5 minute deep dive.

You are not writing an essay about your brilliant idea, you are racing against the clock to explain your idea in 5-10 minutes.

I admit that this is easier to do in 1-1 conversations than in formal presentations. Test your story in 1-1 conversations with smart people before pitching it to larger audiences.

Background overload

Professors, researchers, and teachers like to start their lectures with an extensive discussion of the background and/or context of an issue. Talking about the background is useful if it adds to the story, if it does not it is boring content that fills up those important first minutes of your talk where the audience is still sharp and awake.

Some examples of excess background:

• Tangents, side steps
• History that is important to you (when your company was founded), but irrelevant to the audience (unless you are a Champagne house that goes back to the 1700s)
• Preaching to the converted: spending slide after slide with data the audience is already familiar with, or arguing about issues the audience already agrees with

You are not giving a lecture in economics or history, you are trying to sell an idea.

How to explain magic

Some technology solutions appear to be magic, almost too good to be true. Complicated algorithms that are hard to apprehend for example. Your audience might not believe you, because they cannot understand it, you are trying to sell snake oil. How to pitch magic?

• Do not start of your audience on the wrong foot by claiming yourself that it is magic. It does magical things, but it is not snake oil, everything is science and engineering.
• Use two stories:
• One: a powerful analogy/story that explains the fundamental approach your system takes. This is to explain the concept.
• Two: a super detailed, super in-depth deep dive on one aspect of your algorithm, show how it works on one micro example. This is to show that it is tangible and real

Many people try to make story 1.5: an analogy that is too forced and complicated to understand quickly, and a technology explanation that is too vague that it leaves people wondering whether they are looking at a magician instead of an engineer.

Strangely enough, it is a visual analogy that might drive you to story 1.5. A simpler, verbal story might do a better job here.

SlideMagic beta invites update

I now have sent beta invites to anyone who requested them, including new requests from last week. Check your spam filter, also check spam filters to look for the email confirmation email. If you think I forgot about you, feel free to ping me. Sign up here to be part of the next batch.

CV language

While at McKinsey I spent a lot of time interviewing candidates. The main challenge in a first interview was to cut through the woolly CV language and build a picture of the real person in front of me. Strategic problem solvers, team workers, risk seekers, people persons, big picture people, all these expressions do not mean much since they have been used too many times on CVs.

When designing a slide about your team, it is better to replace the CV language with the actual evidence and cut it down to something that is truly unique about yourself.

Making bullet points look good

Yes, you heard it from a pro: sometimes bullet points are hard to avoid!

• In a document meant for reading rather than presenting
• In a quick internal presentation that is more a decision document than a heart and mind captivating piece of visual art
• In a document that you use to hammer out a legal agreement before handing it over to the lawyers who will expand the basic ideas into fine print
• A first and/or last page in a presentation that summarises what you want to achieve

The key to make them look pretty is stop viewing them as text, but rather see each bullet as a slide object.

• Use some light background colour to make them appear equal in size to the eye
• Spread them out big over the entire page
• Use as little words as you can, but use enough words not to sound generic

In PowerPoint or Keynote, you can use rectangular shapes for this. Even easier is it to use a table with fat white divider lines (the new

Keynote has lost some of its shine

, but the table editing functionality is really good).

In

SlideMagic, my presentation app

, it is really easy to do. Whatever you do, the app will force you to stick to a grid, it ships with a number of templates for text slides, which makes it easy to add and subtract lines.

UPDATE February 2018: I have no added many of the above bullet point slides to the SlideMagic template store, read the blog post about formatting bullet points here.

Getting used to the image

In conservative industry sectors such as finance, the use of images in presentation is not very common. When I put on in, the immediate reaction is one of: that is not how things work here. But usually, over time, people get somehow used to the image and realise that even serious presentations do not have to be boring.



This slide was created with  presentation design app SlideMagic for presentations that mean business

Confusing accounting

Accounting regulation and business reality can sometimes be far apart. A client could show incredible revenue growth because it was forced to recognise revenues early because of accounting regulations. At first sight, it looks great, but as soon as an analyst tries to dig in only a centimeter deeper (“Why does the cash flow not match?”) the story starts to unravel.

Yes, you can explain them how undo the accounting policies, yes a good analyst will probably ignore the profit and loss account (which is merely a tool to set tax rates), and focus on the cash flow. But, you left an impression of hiding the truth. And that leaves a bitter after taste with investors even if the company is actually doing very well (even without the help of obscure accounting policies).

You might have to come clean up front.

SlideMagic examples

I have started to put up some example presentations that I made with the SlideMagic app, you can check them out here. We are preparing the system for more users (replicating templates takes a lot of power at the moment), after which we will add more beta users. Sign up as a beta tester here.

Sizing up the comet

A number out of contrast is hard to put in perspective. That is why our measurements originally were all somehow related to things we can compare to: feet, kilo (1 litre of water), inch (thumb). But when things get really big, or really small it is hard to absorb the scale of something.

In presentations, you would use bar or column charts to compare 2 numbers to each other. The best comparisons are those where the audience can relate to.

Many people tried to use images to put the size of Comet 67P in perspective (example, example). Below is my attempt, where I put the 4.1km height of the big blob in perspective to the 158m height of 26 Broadway in New York. I think the vertical compositions are much more dramatic than the juxtapositions on horizontal maps.

Sales vs. investor presentations

As long as the content is right in an investor presentation, you probably will get away for poor graphics design. Even if you did not manage to draw that banana perfectly, the audience will get the point. It even shows that you are a prudent CEO of an early-stage company not to waste money on expensive graphics designers*.

That changes with sales presentations. If you show up with poorly designed slides, you will lose credibility instantly, even if the content, visual concepts, and story flow are great. You come across as an immature, brand new startup (which you actually are), and that makes people scared to buy from you.

* Note of a professional presentation designer: getting the slides to look pretty from a graphics perspective is not the hard part, it is hard to get the content and concepts right.

Check list vs. stories

When you ask a VC what to include in your pitch, she will instantly produce a check list with menu items. But taking this check list and use its components as the chart headings for your pitch deck will make a boring story. Grocery shopping lists have not won Pulitzer prices (yet).

Craft a story that will excite potential investors, then go back to the check list to see whether you covered everything. Even if the she says that the only thing that matters is the check list. VCs are human and want to be surprised, entertained, and intrigued.

Stains on MBP Retina display

I have a recent 15" MacBook Pro with Retina display and the anti-reflective coating of the screen comes of, like described in this thread on the Apple support forum. I owned many Macs before without screen problems, and I have not changed my hand washing, food consumption, domestic cleaning habits. Does any of you suffer from this? If so, please add your voice to the discussion thread.

The PGDN test

Many investors will scroll rapidly with the page down key through a presentation that is attached to an email. They will skip the cover letter in the email body (too much text), they will skip the dense summary page one of the presentation (too much text) and will continue to scroll down your slides, stopping at pictures (newspaper readers read the caption of a photo before the headline of the article).

I have seen horribly looking presentations that pass the PGDN test. When scrolling rapidly through the pages you actually get what the author wants to say.

I have seen very sophisticated, professional-looking presentations that completely fail the PGDN test (many were written by consulting firms and investment banks).

To your own PGDN test before cold-emailing your pitch.

Free stock images

Sorry for the link bait title. The amount of quality stock photos (free, no attribution required, do whatever you want) is growing very rapidly. I am using more and more of them. Just run this Google search and see for yourself.

Evolving style

My presentation style continues to evolve, here is what I noticed:

• Fewer colours: lots of greys with one strong accent colour (maybe 2), more and more black and white images
• Fewer images: out with the overly simplistic or cliche visual metaphor (stunning photo of a guy standing on a mountain overlooking the valley)
• More consistency between image styles throughout the presentation
• Real, functional images: people using the product, our stores in Geneva, the prototype
• I use lots and lots of tables to layout elements on a slide

New PPT for Mac now 1 year later

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new version of Outlook (the email client for Mac), but at the same time pushes back the launch of a new Mac version of its Office suite (Excel, Word, and of course PowerPoint) by a year to the second half of 2015:

Historically we have released a new version of Office for Mac approximately six to eight months after Office for Windows. However, following the release of Office 365 we made the conscious decision to prioritize mobile first and cloud first scenarios for an increasing number of people who are getting things done on-the-go more frequently. This meant delivering and continuing to improve Office on a variety phones (iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android) and tablets (iPad and Windows)—brought together by the cloud (OneDrive) to help people stay better organized and get things done with greater efficiency at work, school, home and everywhere between.
Continuing our commitment to our valued Mac customers, we are pleased to disclose the roadmap for the next version of Office for Mac—including Word for Mac, Excel for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac and OneNote for Mac.

In the first half of 2015 we will release a public beta for the next version of Office for Mac, and in the second half of 2015 we will make the final release available. Office 365 commercial and consumer subscribers will get the next version at no additional cost, and we will release a perpetual license of Office for Mac in the same timeframe. 

Microsoft is prioritising mobile over its desktop software. It is true that mobile is the hot area right now. But - call me conservative - I still think that initial content creation and design still will require a desktop machine with a big screen. A quick reply to an email, a Tweet, a quick presentation edit, can all be done on a mobile device. Great design, great stories originate from someone focussing, rather than boarding a train.

The other reason behind the delay might be that Microsoft is simply running out of ideas what to add to PowerPoint. It is probably true, that the software has been pushed to its limits, and that the true innovation lies in what to take out. I am working on it.

The bar is rising

The average investor pitch deck gets better and better (bad news for presentation designers like me). SlideShare, video streams of startup competitions, TED videos, all create examples of good presentations that people can copy.

Five years ago, version 1 would be a horribly looking bullet point document with standard Microsoft Office fonts/colours, full of small low resolution images scraped from Google with their aspect ratios distorted, that is changing.

Many startups have some sort of designer involved, she gets pulled of the web site work to give the slide deck a much needed make over. The result: decent looking slides, decent colour scheme, decent story flow, still lots of bullet point slides, but at least they are written properly, newspaper heading style.

How to push it one more level up?

Focus on the content, not so much on the local and feel which is already pretty OK. Here is a check list of possible mistakes:

• Think about where to focus your time/slides. Many of these decent presentations spend too much time stating the obvious. Instead go one level deeper: everyone seems to understand the problem, but why is it that in 2014 we sill have not found a solution for it?
• Add more substance to your competitive differentiation. A simple 2x2 matrix with generic sounding axes is not always enough. Why are these other companies doing something different while it sounds like they do exactly the same thing you do? And why do they do it differently? Very rarely, this will because of stupidity, there is probably another reason these companies focus on a different solution for a different customer segment.
• Even if your bullet points are short and well-written, remember that as soon as you start listing more than 3-5 benefits/differentiators, the audience will perceive this as no benefits/differentiators. Bla, bla, bla

Good luck!

Demo vs introduction

A live app demo is not the same as an introduction of what your app does. Getting the technology to work, logging in as a dummy user, creating some dummy files, showing some dummy output, changing some settings, quickly going back to the management console, before switching to the user screen. All this shows that the app is real, it exists, the beautiful design, the fast response time, the powerful algorithms. But it is step 2 in the introduction, the audience is missing step 1, the overall context of what problem the app solves, and what it actually does. Time to throw in some good old slides that can get these messages across faster/better than a live demo. Then, fire up the tablet.

What to see at a conference

In this blog post, a developer discusses his criteria to pick from an overwhelming menu of presentations at a conference. Some interesting insights for conference organisers and people invited to speak at a conference.

• One person is best. Moderated panels are often an excuse for people to fill time about a subject without preparing much. You get a generic questions, provide a fluffy answer. Everybody sits back, relaxes, nobody takes responsibility for the quality of the presentation. One person on the other hand, feels the responsibility to avoid boring the audience.
• Deep is better than broad. Very generic topics can only scratch the surface. Deep dives on specific issues/problems are much more interesting to watch/listen to.