Changes to the commenting system

After more than a decade, I switched of the commenting system on the blog. In a world with Twitter, commenting volume was relatively low on the blog and often abused by spammers posting below posts from years ago. The Disqus commenting engine I used started off great, but has turned into a huge burden of tracking code over time after the company was sold by its initial owners. The SlideMagic blog now loads a lot faster and offers more privacy.

Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash

Explained: vaccine 90% effective, vaccinated still expected to be 50% of infected

There is a lot of confusion here in vaccinated Tel Aviv, now that around 50% of people infected with COVID appear to be full vaccinated. Newspapers are heavily quoting the “64% i.s.o 90% for the Delta variant” which does not seem to be based on the correct calculation of vaccine effectiveness.

I used an explanation by Dvir Aran to make a slide that explains how it is expected that 50% of infected people are fully vaccinated, even with a 90% vaccine effectiveness.

The logic is as follows:

• Take 100 people who are seriously exposed to the virus

• Assume a 90% vaccination rate (the case for the at-risk population in Israel at the moment):

  • A small group is exposed: 10 people

  • A big group is protected 90 people

• Assume a 90% vaccine effectiveness:

  • 10 out of 10 unvaccinated people will get infected

  • 8 out of the 90 vaccinated people will get infected

• Of the total of 18 infected people, 8 will be fully vaccinated, so around 50/50

Of those 18, the majority of cases with symptoms and serious complications will be unvaccinated of course.

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic library, search for “COVID” and it will pop up, or download it here. Pro subscribers can convert this chart to PowerPoint, if you have to. (Students, you can claim a free membership!).

SlideMagic student program

We are working on new pricing plans, one of which is a free plan for students. Ahead of any formal announcements and websites, blog readers can already take advantage of this options. Email support at slidemagic dot com from your school/university email address (after you created a regular free account), and we will switch you on the new program for one academic year.

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VC pitch cliches

If you are pitching VCs for money, it is a good double check to scroll through these suggestions how to ruin a VC pitch in 5 words or less.

ruin a VC pitch meeting in 5 words or less 👇

— VCs Congratulating Themselves 👏👏👏 (@VCBrags) July 3, 2021

Some of these are funny, some of these are not. But more interestingly, it reveals the cliche jargon that people are using in these pitch meetings. The first check is if your pitch is directly dependent on one of these. The second check though is whether a VC or other investor who might not know you very well, is a bit tired (you are pitch #15 of the day), and just got distracted by a message on her phone, might actually perceive that you are making this mistake, are just the same as all the others.

How do you come across when people are not paying attention 100%?

Photo by Daniela Holzer on Unsplash

How to hire a design agency

Hiring a creative agency is a bit different from negotiating with a building contractor or a car dealer. And talking to a small 1 - 2 person firm as a different story than dealing with a large design firm. Let’s talk about hiring a small firm (I used to be one these myself).

A good designer is busy and can basically decide which projects to take on and which not. Good designers will be expensive, but there are limits to budgets that people have for creative work, so besides “can you afford me” there is a range of other factors which makes a good designer pick you.

What is a good designer after: delivering beautiful work for clients that inspire and are fun to work with.

• Crazy deadlines, “you know how this works, we really need something yesterday”. If you are not an existing client, is unlikely to fly. Working under extreme time pressure is not only unpleasant, it also hurts the quality of the work you can deliver. If the designer is will to accept this, it might be bad sign for the buyer

• Disrespect: showing up late for calls, not replying to emails, taking other calls are all indications for how it is to work with you and whether you are going to pay the bill (in time) when all the work is finished

• Taste mismatch, if the sort of examples you discuss totally do not match the style of the designer, the project is a no go.

• Getting pushed outside of your speciality, “you would have no problem finding someone who can turn this into video right?” Any good designer would refuse this since the end result is almost guaranteed to be suboptimal.

• Creative freedom, if your hands are tied, and you need to follow someone else’s ideas literally, you will get bad end products.

• “We are big, and can give you lots of work, so please discount”. Big design agencies need to fill their fixed cost base of designers with a predictable work stream, the freelance designer who is running out of hands to work with has no such issue.

• “Can you give us some ideas, examples [free of charge]?”. If the designer agrees, she is not busy.

• Very complicated processes: lots of different people involved, lots of decision makers. Big design firms can deal with high maintenance clients via project managers and account managers and more managers. One person creative shops cannot.

A good designer is usually very busy, and very good in a highly specialized area of design. Make her excited work for you.

Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash

Goldman Sachs predicts the Euro 2020...

The economists of Goldman Sachs traditionally have a go at predicting the outcome of major soccer tournaments using models that are usually deployed in the field of economics. As of 28 June, the predication was as follows (you see it is outdated already).

I have added a slide layout based on this to the SlideMagic presentation platform. This type of layout can come in handy for any sort of scenario analysis, not just soccer. It is free to use for anyone inside our desktop app (download it here), search for “soccer” and it will show up.

I made a few changes to the layout:

• Better use of colour

• Flip the position of the score numbers on the ride side, to create a more balanced layout

• Make sure the order of the teams in the matches corresponds to the results of the previous match

Corporate vs consumer audience

Here is a fragment from the introduction of the upcoming Windows 11 operating system by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella.

Windows has always stood for sovereignty for creators and agency for consumers, and with Windows 11 we have a renewed sense of Windows’ role in the world. pic.twitter.com/xHldf38B8d

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) June 24, 2021

I think I sort of get what he trying to say, but it is not obvious. This looks like a derivative of the many internal Microsoft discussions that must have taken place how to position Windows against Mac OSX, iOS, and Android, but now with these names taken out. It makes sense for Microsoft employees that were part of these discussions, to a consumer, a bit less so.

He also builds up to a major message in the beginning that ends in making the “consumer agency” point. For most foreign English speakers, “agency” is usually a group of people that work in advertising (or even presentation design). The other meaning is not very well known and it is risky to make this the headline of your whole pitch.

Picking a useful accent colour

SlideMagic uses a simple colour scheme: (just) one distinct accent colour and lots of shades of white/grey/black.

What are good accent colours?

• One that stands out

• (This is the tricky bit):

  • One with good contrast with white

  • One with good contrast with black

• One that fits with your brand and/or industry, or the opposite one that really sets you apart from everyone else in your industry if that is what you want to do.

• One that you like

People often forget about number 2, which cuts off a lot of creative possibilities with your design

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

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.

Not understanding is not your problem

When your project manager tosses a bunch of vague suggestions your way, “ok this deck is easy, we start with the vision, then show the strategic buckets and mirror these against our core competencies”, and you don’t get it, it is not your problem.

Asking for explanations of everything might annoy her. Instead, ask for a quick example. “Which bucket for example?”, and “and can you mirror it against 1 core competence for me”?

This is like a small “Rosetta Stone” for you, you have decoded this particular case example, now you can take on the rest (and in the process write a presentation with fewer buzz words).

Image by Richard Porson - “Rosetta stone, brought to England in 1802” in Archaeologia vol. 16 (1812), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10617134

Nagging does not sell

Seth “stole” my thunder… A blog post about how nagging and insisting without introducing new information or ideas is not going to get you anywhere has been sitting in my mental pipeline for a while. Some examples.

• People here in the Middle East can be very defensive, and this happened a few times in presentations I attended here around Tel Aviv. After your presentation you get a question, the presenter answers it. The question gets asked again, but it was not really answered. The presenter is not really listening, and more or less repeats the same answer, this time a bit louder. This pattern might repeat itself a few times without a resolution

• As a startup CEO, I get tons of “spam” emails with subject lines and opening sentences that sound like spam. That first email does not trigger a response from me, but it gets followed up by pretty much the same email, with the same subject line in bold

• The investor is not going to invest in you, because she does not invest in medical diagnostics companies, and you are a medical diagnostics company. Trying to convince her that she should invest in these companies will get you nowhere. Either move one, or give the pitch of your company a different spin, away from that particular field.

Parents might succumb to repeated pressure and buy calm in the house, pretty much everyone else will just ignore you.

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"Life by SlideMagic"

My amazing wife Anat Naschitz has always supported me in developing SlideMagic behind the scenes. Going forward, she will become more visible to the outside word. Recently, she created a deck to demo SlideMagic to a potential client. We have added these slides and the entire deck to the SlideMagic template database, so they all should be available in the SlideMagic app for you to use in your own presentation, simply search for “anat” and the slides will pop up.

Using brands in presentations

It is usually hard to find good images of products made by well known brands that are of high quality, not obstructed by advertising copy and free of copyrights. Free photo site Unsplash is trying to change that by building up a revenue model where photographers post (and get paid for) posting images with brands in it. (Curated for quality by Unsplash and endorsed by the brand in question).

This is very useful for presentation designers. Looking for a nice Harley-Davidson motorcycle? Here you go.

I agree with Unsplash’s observation that advertising has deteriorated in quality over the years.

But on their own web site, they can do a bit better with ads for their new shareholder/investor….

Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

PowerPoint cap in a coalition agreement

On page 41 of the coalition agreement of the new Israeli government, some restrictions are put on PowerPoint presentations:

• 10 pages maximum

• 36 point font minimum

• 20 minutes maximum

• Presentations are not a substitute for reading material

I think the last point is crucial: the presentation of your proposal and your working document with all the facts and backgrounds are two documents. Most people now write their working papers in PowerPoint and then are lazy by putting those slides on the screen. If you made something in presentation software PowerPoint, it does not automatically mean that the end product is a presentation.

I offered the government a special version of SlideMagic with minimum font size 36 and 10-slide page limit.

Hi @naftalibennett, I am the founder of Israel-based presentation startup @SlideMagicHQ and am willing to give a special version to the government with fonts below 36 disabled.

— Jan Schultink (@janschultink) June 16, 2021

Source on Twitter.

Keeping the suspense

The award ceremony of a piano competition builds up to the climax of announcing the #1. But keeping the suspense is not always right. In investor pitches, keeping your audience guessing what it is you actually do, is not a smart thing to do (previous post).

The other day I came across another situation where it did not really work. Email invitation: important org update during the weekly update call. So everyone expects the announcement of a promotion or departure of someone senior. Leave the anecdote, intro, buildup aside. Say what is happening in the first sentence, then provide compliments, congratulations, thank you’s.

Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

The spontaneous speech

Here in Israel we had an eventful swearing in of a new government yesterday. The “swearing in” was preceded by a lot of swearing, heckling, and screaming. One of the members of parliament tossed his prepared speech and instead delivered a spontaneous one on the spot, denouncing the behavior of some of his colleagues.

In the world of presentations, many probably have observed this. You work for months on a document/presentation, think carefully about every slide, and then, when put on the spot without your slides, speaker notes and/or projector, you delivery the whole story eloquently and seemingly without any preparation.

Well, not really without preparation. You have been building this story for months in your head. Without the work, the spontaneous presentation would never have worked. It always a good health check for your presentation, “ditch the deck”, and scribble your story if you had to tell it right now without any support. Then compare notes honestly.

Spontaneous speeches are not for everyone. You need to have the plot very clearly in your mind and avoid being side tracked on tangents, losing your energy and ending the story without the punch.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

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

An actual presentation as a template

Most companies have some sort of corporate PowerPoint presentation template sitting on the file system. It consists of a title page, some trackers, some bullet point layouts, some picture slides. The template probably looks ago, but as soon as employees start to use it, this is no longer the case.

Why?

• Most templates are designed as an afterthought, after the logo, web site, letterhead and business card have been approved

• PowerPoint templates are created by designers who understand graphics design, web/print design software, but NOT PowerPoint and as a result a lot of technicalities go wrong

• But most importantly: templates are designed on a blank canvas, encouraging the designer to “do something” with all that white space.

A better approach: start with an actual presentation. The general company introduction, a product sales pitch, last quarter’s analyst presentation. Make that deck look perfect and put on the on the file system as a starting point.

1. The template is designed around actual content, rather than content being forced to fit around a template

2. Most companies need very specific templates. Consumer goods companies: products/packaging demos, market shares and sales across many channels, consumer research data. Pharma: scientific clinical trial data. Chemicals: process layouts, project maps. Consulting firms: fancy frameworks.

I am contemplating some new ideas for SlideMagic to make the above all a bit easier.

Photo by MagicPattern on Unsplash

Better design for legal documents?

Contracts and other legal documents look horrible and are impossible to read.

Even documents produced by the world’s most prestigious law firms are basically Microsoft Word files in Times Roman font with hard coded formating (i.e., no style sheets or templates, but text is formatted directly to be centered, bold, italic.)

But the content is even worse than the design. Complicated sentences and unclear paragraph structures requires you to look for hidden clauses that could be hugely important for the meaning of the contract. (The legal profession probably has an interest in keeping it this way).

Two improvements:

• Bring the design, the look and feel, back to 2021. Fonts, white space, paragraph hierarchies.

• Add a non-binding layman “so what” summary before each paragraph, backed up by the legal code.

As a result contracts will be shorter to negotiate, and people might actually read the terms of use. I might have a look at the SlideMagic terms of use and see if I can give an example…

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Imaginary eye contact

Eye contact is essential for any presentation. Just think of the speakers you have watched who were staring at the ceiling, the floor, or their slides on the projector.

And eye contact means eye contact. Lock in with a member of audience for a few sentences. Quickly moving from one audience member to the other will make it look like you are looking for someone in the room.

This eye contact with strangers will feel awkward for the presenter, but it does not for the audience. There is a way to make it slightly less uncomfortable though. Call it “imaginary” eye contact. Look at random spots in the (dark) audience, for away to the back. Look in between 2 members of the audience. The audience thinks you are connecting with someone, but you don’t really.

In video calls you need to be aware of the camera as your point of eye contact. If you are looking at the screen, the audience will see that you are “looking down”. The closer you are to the camera, the stronger this effect is. If you are relatively far away from your camera and/or laptop, it becomes hard to tell what you are actually looking at.

One other solution is using an external camera and a teleprompter (Seth Godin created the shopping list for you). You look straight into an angled semi transparent mirror, behind which you position your camera. Direct eye contact news anchor style. This setup is great for one on one discussions. But the picture in the teleprompter is relatively small, so it works less well for group calls and presentations where you have to follow along with slides on the screen.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash