Hearing the entire band

It is hard to communicate an idea for a new song without the help of the full band.

• When you play the basic idea on one instrument to someone else, that person misses the context that it is in your head: the result a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

• The same can happen to you. You had that brilliant idea, but when you get back to your note book the next day, the scribbles sound like a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

The same is true for your presentation. Your audience is missing the context that is in your head, and the slides / your story is the only thing they can rely on.

"The hidden benefits of stage fright"

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

"I won't invest, but am willing to help..."

In some cases, an investor might take a meeting or call with zero chance of investing. The investor liked you, the investor is returning a favor to a friend….

The opening sentence of the meeting is likely just that: ‘Zero percent chance that I will invest” followed by a pretty good reason “You are a medical device company, and I only invest in drugs”.

After such an opening, some startups might still try. The result: still no investment, and an investor who is slightly annoyed and cuts the meeting short.

It is better to change objective, and see where this person could actually be helpful.

If it does not fit on a page, it is not good

Celebrity investors often joke that if your pitch cannot fit into a napkin, the pitch must be bad. This is feedback from a super famous investor, who receives dozens of pitches each day, gets pitched everywhere she goes. Yes, if you happen to bump into this investor in the corridor, launch into a 30 minute pitch and get cut off after 45 seconds, you are probably not good at adjusting the pitch to the environment you are in.

Each presentation setting is different. If you meet the celebrity investor’s team in a follow up meeting, and you give a super high level, superficial pitch that is over in 1 minute, you will not have scored many points to get you to meeting 3….

Free SlideMagic Pro for students

SlideMagic Pro (including PowerPoint and PDF conversions) will be available free for students! I have just updated the web site and its pricing page. To apply, create a free account, verify your email, and visit www.slidemagic.com/web/student. At the moment, application processing is partly manual, but in a week from now, the automated system will go live, where students from certain countries can directly log in to the web site of their academic institutions, after which SlideMagic Pro gets turned on instantly. Watch this space.

The one with the orange shirt

In big conferences you see a lot of presentations, and meet a lot of people, and it can be hard to be remembered after a quick corridor chat. For each conversation try to remember something unusual or memorable that happened. “I was the one that pointed you to a local vintage guitar shop”.

Windows app close issue fixed

V37 of SlideMagic had an issue on Windows: closing the last window with the top right ‘X’ did not completely close the app process and as a result, SlideMagic would not reopen again. This issue has been patched in V39 which should automatically install.

You can force an installation in 2 ways

1. Reboot your machine to close V37. Run SlideMagic V37, wait for 5 seconds until the ‘update available’ notification appears. Close SlideMagic V37 via the ‘Exit’ command in the file dropdown manu. Restart SlideMagic which should now start as V39.

2. Or download and install the latest version from slidemagic.com

This issue does not apply to Mac users.

Trying to take full control of the blog

The blog post updates are not going well after the Google Feedreader shutdown. Images don’t get copied correctly, etc. I am trying to get the blog to run on my own servers, with my own email update service. This will also allow me to check and fix all broken links over the years. The challenge will be the 10 years back catalogue with all the image files. Let’s see how it goes.

Getting the same question all the time...

Writing emails to busy people is hard. One thing to keep in mind is that they usually get the same type of question.

• Can I meet you for a coffee?

• Do you want to be on my Board?

• Do you want to invest in me?

• Do you want to buy my software?

If you are asking one of these questions, stand out from the others

If you are actually not asking one of these questions, make it very clear. Your email might get eyeballed very quickly and rejected with “no, I don’t have time for more Board seats”…

Should the fonts of your logo and presentation match?

No.

Now that mobile devices are becoming the dominant screen on which we look at brands, more and more logos become text-based. The font is the key design aspect of the logo. To set your whole presentation in a funky font would not make sense.

Having said that, the fonts of your presentation and the logo are very close, but just a bit different, a design nerd might find it bothersome. (Arial - Helvetica for example). This would only be an issue for big, bold headlines. Though.

Some brands do force the match between logo font and text font. Think of the ads produced by the Absolut Vodka brand. Slogans and headlines are in Extra Bold Futura Condensed all caps and it matches the brand exactly.

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!

Windows on Mac 2022

Another software-related post after my computer swap. SlideMagic is an app that runs both on Mac OSX and Windows machines, so I need a Windows computer to compile and build the software (luckily from one code base). Some observations:

• Desktop operating systems are very mature pieces of software, and sliding more and more in the background. On my old Mac, I did not even bother to upgrade to Monterrey as of now, because of compatibility issues of some very old music production software that I use. Having used Monterrey for a week now, I still hardly notice the difference.

• I used the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 11. Windows is now totally at par with the Mac when it comes to look and feel. The whole experience looks great and works well.

• On Macs with an Intel chip, I would install Windows using Bootcamp. Starting the machine with Windows would leave no trace of anything Mac: you are working on a pure Intel-based Windows machine. Now that Apple switches to different chips, I have opted again for a virtual machine. Windows 11 runs nicely inside a window alongside my Mac software. It is easy to exchange files, very quick going back and forth between the systems, and most importantly, it is easy to adjust the hard disk space your Windows machine takes on your Mac, nothing is set in stone.

• More and more software is written like SlideMagic, one code base creates identical looking apps for both Windows and Mac.

• With the differences in software / UI disappearing, the main differentiator between Mac and Windows is actually the hardware: build quality, design, and most importantly the quality of the screen. Macs are usually great, but in the world of Windows, there is a huge range of machines, from really poor/cheap to fantastic/expensive.

It is amusing to read earlier posts on the same topic, some of them going back for more than a decade.

Computer update 2022

After 4 years, my MacBook died on me during a holiday abroad last week. A flat battery would not recharge again to bring it back to life. I upgraded to a new computer instead of fixing my old one.

I am trying to remember the Macs I went through since 2008:

• Air

• 17” MBP

• 15” MBP

• 27” iMac

• 15” MBP

• And now: 14” MBP

Of these, the iMac is still running in great shape as the living room computer.

Updating a computer used to be a huge deal in the 1990s and 2000s, because you had to get your data across, or worse, recover your data, or even worse: give up on your data. Now, computers have become a disposable tool. Get a new one, quickly install your software, and you are good to go with all data being available and backed up online.

Some thoughts on the 2022 machine:

• Again a laptop. Mobility is important. Even more now than in my previous life as a designer, a critical bug in one of my sites might need patching instantly, no matter the place on earth or time of day.

• I am on continuing my 1 big monitor, laptop as side screen setup. There was a time I would run 2 giant 27” monitors side by side. Just too much stuff: I would use the space to add Twitter feeds, email inboxes and other distractions. It is better to focus. The small screen is my “copy paste” scratch pad.

• I went for the more compact 14” screen. The 16” machine is too bulky. Especially given my monitor setup in the my day to day office. Less heavy, and it fits in antique hotel room safes that have not been updated over the past 20 years.

• I took it easy on the performance upgrades. Some of my earlier machines had custom high end specs. I think it makes more sense to upgrade more frequently. This M1 processor is a huge step in performance for example, easily outperforming a few extra MHz on an i7 CPU.

Let’s hope this one will last a few good years.

P.S. It is good to see that SlideMagic is running snappy on the new machine….

Two pitches, two pitchers

When pitching our new venture in the healthcare industry, we discovered that there are 2 totally different pitches, one to industry insiders, and one to complete outsiders.

• The insiders usually get the idea in a second, so the pitch switches to why they should join (and change the way they have been working for decades)

• The outsiders do not have the context and don’t understand the jargon of what we are doing. It requires an extra step back to explain the idea. When that is done though, they understand instantly why people should join.

In meetings, my partner and I are adjusting. I step forward in discussions with industry outsiders, while she leads the story for healthcare insiders.

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.

Proportions

It is extremely hard to make a digital composition of multiple images look credible as a realistic scene. See in the ads below, the sizes of the objects are not right in relation to each other, and the angle of lens is inconsistent.

Alternative approaches:

• An illustration

• Make the actual shot in the field

• Use proper 3D animation software

This could have been a better video

Israel caught Iran stealing IAE documents and using them to conceal dubious nuclear activities. Israel put Iran’s plan in a Google Drive folder for everyone to read.

Iran stole classified documents from the UN’s Atomic Agency @IAEAorg and used that information to systematically evade nuclear probes.

How do we know?
Because we got our hands on Iran’s deception plan.

It’s right here:https://t.co/qg1Fj7iClA pic.twitter.com/6dAhI6VmmW

— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) May 31, 2022

The video to explain all this to the world is not very strong though:

• The graphics are really basic and childish (no, not the same as South Park)

• The story in the video does not tell very much

• These dark Holywood trailer style voice over is not really working either.

There is a better way to do it I think. First of all, the audience does not consist of Israelis and other people who already are on Israel’s slide. The target segment are the ones who are sitting on the fence in the middle. The message ‘look at these dark and evil people’ will not stick. What might work though is a message of ‘these people who seem so friendly in your negotiation meetings do something completely different behind your back when you are not looking’.

To create this effect:

• A lighter, friendlier and factual voice (I would use a female one)

• ‘Documentary style’ movie

• Add a bit about the story on how you got the documents (news media love spy stories)

• Use a much more factual approach with screenshots from the documents and satellite images of desert landscapes (Ken Burns zoom) to show what happened.

Typography tutorial

Why does certain typography look great and others not? When a designer ‘get its right’, she is intuitively adjusting a great number of parameters. And the most important ones are not the obvious ‘in your face’ ones (such as the font type). Paragraph width, line height, lots of subtle adjustments that can make a big difference to your layout.

This online typography tool lets you experiment with some of these parameters and get feedback on the result

Google Lens for images in your browser

When you right click an image in Google Chrome, you now get an extra option to search the image with Google Lens, which generates similar images, find places where the same image is used (often including the original source), translations etc.

"Picking your brain"

Often used as an excuse for a meeting, but is it really?

Every meeting should have an objective. Just casually chatting is a waste of time (in a professional context). The PYB sentence has been abused so many times that many investors and other people receiving such requests will instantly turn it down. There are better things to do.

• Do you really think you need to pick someone’s brain? Maybe think again, and there might be a very specific objective that you are actually after. Adjust your pitch, pitch deck, and meeting invite accordingly. It makes things clearer for everyone.

• Maybe you have a specific agenda and are afraid to reveal it. In the age of Zoom, people have become more efficient and open. Maybe your meeting target is actually totally happy to take a short Zoom call and brainstorm which of her contacts could help you in a job search.