Rehearsing

Rehearsing a live presentation is the best way to invest time in your pitch, better than tweaking slides and editing headlines.

Many rehearse settings go as follows: the project team takes turns in going through their slides, sitting down at the table, looking at the laptop, starting and stopping (to do a quick edit), and not doing a real practice: “OK, on this page I will lay out the company strategy” <CLICK>.

This is a bit like an imaginary workout: “and then I will do the 10 lifts”.

The real practice:

• Can be on your own in the beginning (so you can embarrass yourself if needed)

• Laptop with the slides behind you (or dual monitors with presenter view)

• Imaginary objects to create an “audience”, divide your eye contact to the red chair, the water jug, and the desk light for example.

• No stopping, at least not in the middle of a slide, if you trip up, you have to correct as if it happened in front of 200 people.

• Time your talk

Even if you think you know your story, you will notice that it is tough to say things clearly, without “uh”s, without duplicating what you already said, without getting stuck, but things will improve radically after a few iterations.

I think 99% of the world’s brilliant speakers simply have given a the same pitch in some form or another hundreds of times. Yes, they get confronted with a new slide and present it brilliantly without preparation, but, that slide probably contains a story that they have told many times before.

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2x2 matrix overload

This 2x2 chart is hard to understand (source on HBR)

From a design point of view:

• Axes labels are hard to read

• Axes labels are too blunt, mathematics has its uses

• Too many dots at locations that are too precise

• Typography of the labels goes across the boxes

• The 4 quadrant labels do not stick out enough

And that’s the design part. More importantly, the content… The title of the chart seems to suggest that it is just an example of how to use 2x2 matrices, but I think people are serious about its content. A comparison of apples and oranges. I need to start casually learn how to do data cleaning, and not yet get into AI but be prepared for it, and to use AI, I don’t need to understand statistics at all.

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What do you do?

It is important to settle the basics about what you actually do in the first instance of a pitch. It will pop some of the suspense, but in return you get the upside of an audience which pays attention instead of one that is trying to figure out what you do.

In fiction, readers are longing for that moment where the entire plot comes together. In business, not really.

Recently, I coached a company in the field of quantum computing, and I suggested to put 3 very short bits of info at the very start of the presentation, and claimed that this would actually not kill the “suspense” in the talk.

• A super quick “reminder” of quantum versus traditional physics

• A super quick highlight what quantum vs. binary computing is

• A super quick description what a “quantum computer” actually is, physically.

The challenge is not to elaborate about the points above on that first summary point:

• In Newton’s traditional physics, objects have a specific location and behave according to the laws of gravity (i.e., electrons “flying” around an atom nucleus), in quantum physics, these boundaries no longer exists and you are no longer able to say where objects are precisely.

• Quantum computing uses this ambiguity of an infinite number of states an object can be in, instead of a discrete 0 and 1, we now an infinite umber of states that opens up the potential for massive parallel computing

• Today’s quantum computing setups are lab installations in which scientist try to control / measure these states, and try to use the speed of their variations to solve problems where you need try out a particularly large number states (i.e., trial-and-error AI algorithms). It is still early days.

Not scientifically correct, probably not correctly worded, but people will get the idea.

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PowerPoint conversion is working!

I managed to implement the conversion of all SlideMagic features, including the tricky ones (data charts, image cropping and positioning, speaker notes, etc.) into a razor sharp PowerPoint deck with all shapes, data charts, objects completely editable if you created them yourself from scratch.

(This as opposed to the current PPT conversion that makes a rendering that works as you as you do not touch/edit any of the shapes inside the deck)

Now it is on to debugging and making everything super robust in every possible user (ab)use scenario.

The current setup is in a lab environment and not yet kosher enough for public release. If you are curious, are have a SlideMagic deck that you are desperate to convert, email me your SlideMagic presentation ID and I can apply the new technology for you. The conversion software only runs on Windows, but since it is me doing the conversion on my machine (for now), both Windows and Mac users can submit their decks.

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The art of procrastination

Waiting with things until it is too late to do them properly is not very good practice. But postponing the moment you open your computer to start making slides before you have a really good idea could be helpful. Take time to ponder different approaches.

In the video below, film score producer Tom Holkenborg gives his point of view from the world of music.

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Page numbers...

After more than 10 years of daily blog posts, they deserve a mention.

Some presentation templates have page numbers prominently featuring on every page. Page numbers are useful for coordinating viewers who each have a copy of a document in front of them: attendees of an investment bank roadshow with a pitch book in their lap, or people trying to pay attention on a conference call without a screen sharing tool. But in most cases, the presenter controls the slides and there is actually no need for them at all.

As a compromise, I tend to put them really, really, tiny in the top right corner of a slide in a faded font color. You don’t see them if you are not looking for them.

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SlideMagic to PowerPoint - update

I made a lot of progress over the past weeks with getting the conversion of SlideMagic files to PowerPoint sorted. Below are some of the first screen shots. All shapes are fully editable, have the exact/perfect sizing, and sit on a slide that has the grid lines as guides added to them, so it is easy to make correction if you want. Note how this also applies to data charts.

All this took some figuring out since the PowerPoint object model is incredibly complex. The pay off is that I start to understand not only PowerPoint file structures very well, but am also getting a deep understanding of my own software (the development of which I outsourced). This is sparking all kind of ideas where I can take things next.

At some stage over the next few weeks I will invite beta testers for the new software. Let me know if you are interested to join. Things will run only on Windows at the moment, and either you or your IT manager need to happy that you install all kind of plugins that have permission to write on your hard disk etc..

A new SlideMagic tab will added to your PowerPoint ribbon

Making progress, the column charts will get done today

The grid will be reflected in the guide lines on the converted slides

PowerPoint charts can be hard to line up manually, SlideMagic glues them to the grid for you

Logitech MX Master 2S review

My recent deep dive into the writing code (More than 1000 lines and counting) forced me back on the Windows platform to make the best use of Microsoft’s development tools (see an earlier post). The biggest problem I faced with the Apple Magic mouse: wild UI swings when navigating PowerPoint slides because of the imperfect calibration of the glass touch surface in Windows 10.

So, I got myself a Logitech MX Master 2S mouse…

I burnt through many of these clunky mice in the 1990s and 2000s and actually liked them, except for the “silky” silicon covers of them that would turn sticky after a year of use.

This Master 2S version got rid of that silicon by the feel of it. Yes, it is bulky and looks nerdy but I must admit, it feels actually a lot more comfortable to have something you can rest your hand on when working all day. That resting is the big problem of the Magic Mouse: by design you cannot really rest your hand on the touch sensitive glass, your hands is always hovering above it, requiring constant energy. On Mac, the calibration works, on Windows it does not.

Instead of the glass, the Logitech mouse has scroll wheels. The vertical scroll is brilliant: you feel a clicking resistance when while moving slowly, but the wheel starts spinning smoothly when you race up and down (pages of code). Horizontal scroll is another (small) wheel on the side, which is definitely less natural than the Magic Mouse.

And yes, you can continue to use the Logitech mouse when it is connected to your computer for charging.

If the silicon stickiness stays away, I can actually live with the increased comfort at the expensive of a nerdy looking device…

Windows on a Mac - 2018

For my SlideMagic development efforts, I need to dive deep into the bowels of Microsoft’s .NET architecture and there was no other option but to install a Windows machine on my Mac. I am running a 2015 iMac and here are my observations of using this set up as a production environment:

• In general

  • Windows 10 is great and at par with MacOS

  • PowerPoint 365 on Windows is better (has more feature and UI updates) than PowerPoint 365 on Mac which in turn is better than Keynote (2018)

  • The CTRL-C/V vs CMD-C/V is an absolute productivity disaster, after a few days of coding I am used to CTRL, which I then need to unlearn when working on a Mac (design, music) before I have to unlearn it again.

• There are some glitches with running Windows 10 on my machine (presumably these do not happen when you buy a “proper” PC)

  • I had to do some pretty hard core registry entry hacking to get my mouse to behave properly (direction flipping), even after tweaks the sensitivity of the Apple Magic Mouse is too strong. Especially when resting your finger on the glass surface, this immediately triggers the wildest switches between slides in PowerPoint for example. I am considering investing in a Microsoft mouse in the hope that these are properly calibrated

  • The video graphics card is acting a bit strange here and there (this could be a problem of my specific iMac generation). In some cases, after the computer wakes from sleep, the mouse pointer is a blurry vertical line. Also, hardware acceleration has a tendency to mess up text in Google Chrome (switching acceleration of kills the user experience). As result, I am one of the 500 people in the world who run the Microsoft Edge browser, which is actually pretty good for consumer browsing, but less suited for coding. I Googled extensively to find solutions for these problems but always hit a dead end where someone discovered that these are actually graphics card drivers bugs that have not been fixed yet.

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What's interesting, what's not

In some industry sectors, product benefits are pretty much the same in the last decade. The next iPhone has as least as good a battery life, management of all those different IT security solutions is now made much easier with the increased visibility of the security management tool, the range of electrical cars is again increasing.

Every company pitching in the same industry as you says the same thing. (“We offer more battery life, provide better visibility, etc. etc.).

In these cases, the interesting bit of your story is how you do it, and maybe even more importantly, why it is so hard for others to do this.

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Coding...

I left the world of computer science in 1992 after receiving my engineering degree, and recently made an effort to bring my skills back to 2018. The first version of the SlideMagic app was outsourced to a developer, and I had virtually no understanding of the underlying code, and focusing purely on designing the user interface.

As I am pushing for the next iteration of the app, I want to change that and I am making great progress. The “practice” feature I am working on is developing a razor sharp, 100% correct, conversion of SlideMagic decks into fully editable PowerPoint files. (The current conversion gives you a clean file that you can present in PowerPoint, but as soon as you start to edit PowerPoint shapes, the imperfections in the conversion are revealed, but it is already one level up from many other presentation applications that simply paste a screenshot of a slide into a blank PowerPoint slide).

The process so far has been interesting and I am starting to understand the file structure of PowerPoint files, the PowerPoint object model, Microsoft’s .NET framework and the C# language. All of this technology is sparking new potential ideas where to take SlideMagic next.

Software development in larger teams is like a funnel: you define the spec, and the developers set the train in motion to deliver it. Sometimes, the phase I am in, less organised and experimenting where I can, works better to come up new concepts to make it easier for people to create presentations and business documents in general, especially the “everyday” ones.

Apologies to the potential clients for bespoke design work I have been turning down over the past few months, but hopefully they can benefit from what I come up with at the moment at some stage in the future.

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Number (in)consistencies

Have a look at the elaborate footnote at the bottom of this graph in a recent Venture Beat post:

A big apology for using multiple data sources, and as a result, producing 2 sets of slightly inconsistent numbers in the same report.

Data sources are almost always confusing and inconsistent. But that is the problem of the analyst, not the audience of a presentation. Using inconsistent in a presentation makes it harder for the audience to understand your story, but more importantly it also undermines your credibility.

If you have a good reason to adjust publicly available figures (and the VB team seems to have), why not create your own new data set? This is what we did at McKinsey all the time, adding the famous “McKinsey analysis” as a source of the figures at the bottom.

So, when having to present an analysis:

1. Analyse all the inconsistent and confusing data around there

2. Decide if you are confident enough to make adjustments: decide whether you are going to go with the raw data, or your own data. Stick to this throughout your presentation

3. If you decided to use your own, you can throw in a backup chart at the end that shows how/where your adjustments impacted the data that people are used to seeing.

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Ways your presentation can look wrong

There are many:

• It has standard PowerPoint colors, you couldn’t be bothered to even try to make an effort

• It looks so slick and professional, like an iPhone launch deck, that potential investors in your seed company start to wonder what you are hiding (and how smart your spending is)

• It is clear that you made a tremendous effort to make things look slick but all those gradients, shadows, clip art, and icons somehow still do not look right

• Those curly accents, mint green soft fonts, and cute images look pretty but it does not seem right for a semiconductor company that needs to pitch to global device manufacturers

• The spectacular animations that keep on moving and/or these clashing colors unsettle the audience’s central nerve system

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The summary bullet point page

Some sections in a presentations cry for something that ties everything together, a summary at the start rather than charging straight in with 1-message, 1-slide charts. Also, these summary charts come in handy for people who are reading your slide deck, rather than experiencing the live performance.

How to avoid turning your presentation in a boring bullet point reading exercise?

The mistake people make with these bullet point summary charts is that they spent too much time on a bullet point more or less telling the whole story, and then, repeating the whole story again when they hit the slide that was supposed to deliver the message, but probably spending too little time on that one because it feels repetitive.

So what to do?

• Keep these summary bullets really short (but meaningful)

• Go through them as a summary (“Our product has 3 advantages: design, weight, and an exciting colour, let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail”) [CLICK, next slide].

Almost keep up the same speed as it would take someone to read the bullets, and develop a radar for when you start using the word “uh”, and go into a tangent about product colours at bullet 3.

It requires discipline.

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Consistency = credibility

“Our technology saves costs!”. In the early days of a startup it is often not possible to quantify exactly what the cost benefits of your product will be. And many decks I see reflect that uncertainty. In the same deck you can see:

• Slide: cost is a big problem

• Slide: a technology gap makes users lose a lot of time

• Slide: our technology can deliver double the power at the same cost

• Slide: cost savings at our pilot client were 30%

• Per transaction cost went from $1.1 to $1.2 at 40% more power

Investors will forgive you if things are not completely certain at the moment, but get confused when you throws different stories at them.

All the points above can be rooted in one single, consistent story. Maybe it is better to phrase exactly what is happening with your product, and then show a number of scenarios who it could create value for clients.

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Story evolves - the chart did not

I often say that slides are a safety net for the presenter in the early days of a presentation. After a number of runs, the presenter becomes confident enough to deliver the story pretty much without slides. Putting up the next slide is merely a mental placeholder that triggers the next point in the story.

As a presenter, you might fail to notice that after a couple of months your story can change/drift, and the actual slide that you put on the projector no longer back it up completely.

It is good to do an objective 10,000 km check up now and then, maybe with the help of a person who is not that immersed in the story as you are.

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Logarithmic scales

In the 1980s, I remember plotting the results of science experiments in high school on millimeter paper. Logarithmic scales came in handy: they allow you to plot data series with big variabilities accurately, and/or they can show mathematical relationships beautifully (a completely straight line on a logarithmic scale for example).

Scientific charts are for pondering at your desktop, a different setting from a 20 minute all or nothing investment pitch. When you show a boring growth line and have to alert the audience that the tiny labels on your y axis are in fact on a logarithmic scale, you have lost some of your fire power. It looks less spectacular, and more importantly, it requires additional thought steps in the brains of your audience. The hockey stick simply works better.

If you are dealing with serious science, consider 2 charts right after each other, the first (populist) one showing the raw growth, then followed by a logarithmic one that takes the responsible scientific approach.

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Customer service

Seth Godin always reminds me that it is impossible to please everyone, and as a result focus on people who really love and support your work.

The SlideMagic app and template store currently are small retail businesses where I am also in charge of customer service. And as a result, service at the moment is at the highest standards, you get a pretty experienced presentation designer to fix charts for your for $1 if things are not right.

Still, now and then you get interactions with clients who talk to you like the hotline of a major airline rather than a mom & pop store, requiring immediate refunds or else…

Hopefully one day SlideMagic will be big enough to merit an airline-size customer support desk, in the mean time I continue to develop things with followers who support me.

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Like writing a letter in the old days

Pitch presentations have become more common, to a level that they now match the request letters people used to write on type writers in the 1970s to pitch business proposals: most people have made hundreds of them, seen thousands of them, everyone knows how they look, everyone knows what it is trying to do, everyone knows the basics of a startup pitch.

Despite them being very common (and maybe because of), writing a good pitch letter was (is) hard. Writing the actual thing does not take a lot of time, but knowing what and how to write is tricky and that blank piece of paper is daunting.

That is pretty much the feeling you get when having to email a pitch deck to someone.

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Pitch deck = open book exam

Well said:

A pitch deck lets you structure the conversation in the ways you want, lets you show the data you’ve chosen, makes sure you don’t miss anything you want to say, and lets you rehearse. It’s your open-book exam.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) September 22, 2018

So a pitch deck:

1. Makes you in charge of the flow

2. Helps you show data

3. Is a check list

4. Lets you rehearse

“Earth shattering, stunning visuals that will convince the investor in the spot” does not feature in this list.

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