Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
AI is turning the semi conductor industry upside down, and I saw this interesting graphic comparing the market caps of Nvidia and Intel, which look very different from a few years ago.
The circles are cute, but are softening the contrast between the 2 numbers. Two dimensional surfaces look closer together than straight bars, see below.
This is also the reason that I prefer to use stacked columns over pie charts.
I was talking about prioritizing your time a few days ago and remembered a time prioritization tool that was suggested to me while at McKinsey. It turns out it is called the “Eisenhower Matrix”. I added it as a template to SlideMatic.
They key insight here was to be really rigorous and actually don’t do unimportant, not urgent tasks. The problem though was that all requests added to my desk were important and urgent….
During our very short (see yesterday’s post) speaking slot to launch a new partnership for 9xchange, we used the slide below. Deal making in healthcare is inefficient because everyone needs to kiss too many frogs in order to uncover their prince.
It got stuck in people’s head, and during the following presentations, presenters kept on referring back to frogs in their own talks. Free publicity.
When speaking at a conference and you get offered two possible speaking slots: early in the day and very short, and later in the day and a lot longer. Which one to take? Easy, the early/short one.
Attendance at conferences drops during the day, your audience is a lot bigger in the morning
When people see you speak (early) they are more likely to approach you later, (feedback about) your presentation is an ice breaker
In conferences, a really short speech is likely better than a long one. You are not here to close the deal, just to start more conversations. Your short speaker slot is a blessing.
My other venture 9xchange had a a busy week. We announced a partnership with AI-enabled drug discovery company BenevolentAI at the Biomed conference here in Tel Aviv.
On 9xchange, we match buyers and sellers of pharmaceutical drugs that are still in development. Sometimes, a drug no longer fits the strategy of a pharma company, sometimes, a drug fails clinical trials for a specific disease, but might still work for another one.
BenevolentAI has technology to find potential new indications for drugs. Drugs posted on the platform are exposed to its AI engine and results are fed back into 9xchange to broaden the number of matches between buyers and sellers, now taken into account newly discovered indications for which this drug might work.
It is often quick and easy to use PowerPoint to draw a diagram. No need to install and learn new specialized software. A few boxes, lines, a screenshot, and you are done. But why the result totally obvious a PowerPoint slide, even if you are not using the program to present your visual?
Over the past years (decades for some) we have become so used to seeing PowerPoint slides with the built-in fonts, standard color palettes, that most people will recognize it instantly. But when your end product is a screenshot, you don’t have to worry about things like font compatibility and presentation templates.
Change colors and fonts to match the document you are working in
Let go of the restrictions of the aspect ratios for a slide (4:3, 16:9) and pick something that is appropriate for your diagram.
I am usually not a big fan of illustrations that visualize data. Below is an example (with data from February 2022). The soldiers might as well have been represented by straight bar charts.
This article in the NYT though, was pretty effective. Representing unused office space with repetitions of well-known landmarks. People can instantly relate to, understand, and internalize the amount of space we are talking about.
(BTW, these illustrations are made by Kaylie Fairclough)
I like to play some music in my free time, here is a new synthesizer that was released this week. It sounds great, but I would have loved that they spent a bit more time on solving the grid puzzle of the knobs and buttons….
But hey, I am probably the only one worrying about this…
A good presentation has images that are consistent in style throughout the deck. Same color palate, same mood, same type of characters. This was very hard to achieve unless you make drastic design decisions: vintage black and white only, pop art cartoons only, impressionist paintings only (remember Ideatransplant ?), or cheesy stock images only.
AI can bring a solution here. Invest time in developing a standard prompt that generates the desired setting for your photo, then apply that same prompt consistently with small variations to get your snaps.
Databases of image prompts are starting to pop up (see a list here, writing this in May 2023) and this trend might well be the beginning of the end of stock image sites and even model agencies.
People are speed-reading emails. If you got someone willing to introduce you to someone else, and she says “send me an email that I can forward”, she is very likely to do just that, hit forward.
Don’t expect much text editing, explaining, or pitching from your contact. Yes, she know your company. Yes, she knows what you want from the introduction. The person to whom it gets forwarded has little idea. Do the hard work for her.
Writing the intro line for her (“I had a coffee yesterday with my good friend, and it struck me that the customer segment targeting positioning of their value proposition exactly matches or long-term vision for the business unit”), is likely going to have the line “See below, interested?” above it.
You are pitching for the next interaction with the person you get introduced to, not the closing of the deal itself. On the one hand, this will make writing this email a lot simpler, on the other hand, it means that you have make it super personal and relevant, a standard pitch won’t do it.
Lawyers love to negotiate (and bill hours) by changing words and lines in linear text. This works perfectly for deals that are standard and very well understood. The price of a product, the distribution commission, the number of shares.
When the business or the business model is a bit unusual, things go wrong. The 2 parties, and their lawyers (that’s 4 entities) can easily get confused. People think they understand, but they do not.
The solution: negotiate based on a sketch or a slide layout and use an imaginative case example with some made up, but realistic numbers. It is easy to refer to the year 3 sales redistribution commission as “those $42k”. Everyone knows what you are talking about.
After all this, the deal can be put in writing.
I have been experimenting extensively with prompting ChatGPT for the use in presentations. In a sense, I am glad that I did not raise huge amounts of money a few years ago in order to build features that now more or less come out in a few minutes.
Still there is a difference in “hacking” some quick results in a demo and having a stable product that can be used in the front line of presentation design.
These features have all to do with the automatic generation of layouts and story lines. Further out in the future though, there might be other applications that can replace the slide deck as the central tool to pitch ideas.
Slides can be grouped in 4 categories:
Visualizations. A layout of data and/or elements with relationships that show something that is very hard to explain in linear text. Reading out all the columns of a data table is boring. Explaining the structure of DNA in words is impossible
Background graphics. A nice picture or a few words that fill up that giant screen on stage and makes the overall picture frame (you + slide) look a lot better
Trackers. A favorite of management consultants: some sort of table of contents that reassures you were we are in the overall story.
Transcripts. Bullet points mapping 1-on-1 what the speaker is saying.
Think about when to use which one for what.
Complex visualizations might not work as a dramatic background image when you reveal your product. Background graphics will not say much in a document that you email without explanation. Trackers don’t say anything. Transcripts are horrible on stage, but might work when emailing to someone (i.e., a text document).
You have a choice when naming the labels in a comparison chart. For example: “price: high” is the same as “cheap: no”. Make sure that all highs and lows, or yes’s and no’s are aligned in the same direction, i.e., things that are “good” all have the same word value associated with it. See the simple diagram below.
Getting the proportions on a slide right is tricky because it requires an intuition that is very hard to capture in a set of simple rules. An example below. I will have presentations where I center the diagram around the boxes of the 2x2, or other ones where I will center the diagram including its axis titles. Most people probably could not be bothered by this.
It is because of things like this (design is hard to capture in rules) that I think a ChatGPT-like algorithm for page layouts might have a big potential.
A reader pointed me to a pitch deck review of Honeycomb’s latest fund raising round. (See the post on TechCrunch). The deck itself can also be found and downloaded on SlideShare (which seems to have undergone a revamp).
The deck obviously worked, because the company managed to raise the $50m round. But I doubt that the slides in the deck were the key driver of this success. They slides look decent, but this is not stellar design. The purple branding seems a bit off from the corporate colors, some slides contain “white paper speak” that is typical in enterprise software, and the graphics between the slides are not completely consistent.
Honeycomb is a later-stage software company which can easily be x-rayed by investors who understand software: growth rates, CACs, etc. etc. It is the numbers (which are not in this deck but were shared in later-round due diligence discussions) that will reveal exactly where the company is going.
The important pitch is probably the “audio track” along side the slides: Honeycomb has managed to carve out a new software category that is/will become a key component of every enterprise’s IT budget. I am sure the CEO nails this in an in person presentation.
Always put other company’s pitch deck design and outlines in the context of your own company.
Wide-screen televisions are great for watching movies, but not for reading text. A line that spans across the screen is hard to read and does not look very pretty. There is a reason that print newspapers use columns to limit the number of words on one line.
Think about this when designing slides, switch to a multi-column grid, or simple leave space unused left and right of your text (something that many web pages do), see the examples below.
It can take months to get the results of your strategy project, or your business plan. And along with it, your pitch deck has evolved as well. You take it out for every meeting.
A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.
Tel Aviv is trying to improve the clarity of their parking signs, who can park when. The sign below is the new format. (If you do not read Hebrew, you will get tickets…)
I would have gone for a much simpler shape that would make the table easier to read. Here is a sketch (obviously not a final design)
Put all the details (hours of day and night, etc.) in a dense footnote at the bottom. Once you have read the footnote once, you can just glance at the shape anywhere in the city and now what you are up to.
My guess is that the detailed table with explicit instructions was selected to make it easer to deal with law suits of people disputing their tickets.
Every communications books and marketing strategists says it. Who is your audience? And many presenters would answer I know: the “C-level executive who is eager to get efficiency and transparency benefits for a better price than the current offerings in the market segment in between premium and super premium”.
That does not sound like a real person to me. Maybe it is someone new on the job who wants to impress her boss. Maybe it is someone buried under so many projects that she does not see how she has time to take on another one. Maybe it is someone who does not like that you get back to emails only after 5 days. Maybe it is someone who ia upset that you still keep talking about things she said she was not interested in. Maybe it is someone who needs to convince a colleague to use your product.
If you cannot visualize your target audience as a person, you might not have found it yet.
