4/8/2023 0 Comments Rule 34 perfect darkI’m an academic (a catch-all term for someone who spends most of his time with his nose in a book and has very little chance of seeing the kind of money a successful entrepreneur would make), but the same basic principle apply, and they apply in an awful lot of situations. Have to say, you’re selling yourself short if you think this is only applicable to entrepreneurs and venture capital. It does not relieve the presenter of being and integral part of the presentation and message transfer, regardless of whether it is a business presentation or a training program. Remember, the slide show is there to support the message and information transfer. Complete knowledge of the subject matter eliminates the need for “wordy” slides and reading the slide to the audiance from the slide, normally with your back turned to the audiance. The most important part of the presentation is the complete, expert knowledge of the subject matter by the presenter. “the dancing rabbit”, “barking dog”, and so forth. The biggest abuse I have witnessed is the use of “stupid” text animation and spot animations that add no value to the visual communication (i.e. Review this article I wrote regarding visual communication. Business pitches are a little different than training programs, but there is much more to developing a presentation. I agree with Guy on his approach to slide shows. PowerPoint is very good, and fast, for making outstanding slide shows. I have been making slideshows since 1970, back when it took 4 hours to make the original art for a color slide. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough second, they think that more text is more convincing. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are: If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting-and venture capitalists are very normal. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease-don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog.
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