Everyone at some time needs to write a tutorial and this is a good guide for you to follow. Again, this is Guy Kawasaki and is very informative.
Learn and Enjoy
http://blogs.openforum.com/2009/03/19/the-art-of-the-tutorial/
It gets intensive when you are doing those PowerPoints. And there are so many of them, to so many people; friends and family, prospective clients, strategic partners, Angels and of course, VCs.
You just want to make it so right and believe me, the way the slides start out are never how they end up being presented. It is a good feeling though, when you see your idea and vision take fairly impressive shape. If like me it is something you are not used to – I was a Technical Project Manager for Cisco Systems, building WAN & LAN networks across Europe, Middle East & Africa. Tactical as they come!! – then you bring people in, read a shed load of books, learn and repeat strategic principles over and over again until they become second nature. I was only thinking the other day if I could go back to an employee at a big company again. My brain is definitely coded differently now but in a good way. The ability to seek out and identify opportunity is something you can never turn off once switched on.
But you can get stuck on ‘over detailing’ the nonsense because you are so intent on making that lasting impression. It doesn’t matter. Really. Let me give you an example and then let you know what Angels and Venture Capitalists are really looking for based on an evangelical proposal from a VC guru you made have heard of, Guy Kawasaki. By the way, if you haven’t heard of Mr Guy Kawasaki, click on the link, have a stroll around his blog and subscribe to his daily offerings. Very good advice and some really useful book and general business information links.
Okay, so building one particular presentation that had two audiences; some angel investors and a major rail system operator in the US, I became so wound up in making sure the presentation looked perfect that I started to stray away from the content (which is something you will tend to do towards the end of the process of building the slide content – at the point when it is almost right) and started to focus on the colors, the photographs, the format of the graphs, the master slide format, the color and shape of the horizontal bars and the bullet points. It started to consume to the point I felt the presentation was never going to be ready. I would sit up, obsessed with making perfect bullet points out of a gif of the logo of my company. And not just one night. Oh no, many nights would I fret about the way the presentation was going to be perceived and the subliminal messages I could give on the attention to detail and professionalism of my company and the people running it. At a certain red eyed point, I had a revelation and I don”t remember whether I got to it myself, or whether my wife came down during the night and beat me across the head or whether my business partner gave me the wake up call in the form of a booted boney foot up my ass.
It’s all relative and bigger in my head.
If you knew what the people on the other side of the desk would be thinking, you – as I did eventually – would not give a flying feck about the shape of the horizontal line on slide 6 and 8. It really doesn’t matter one tiny iota and the cold hard fact is that it is only you that is watching.
So Mr kawasaki has read and listened to literally thousands of pitches in PowerPoint format and so I am going to echo his rules for pitching to any VC or Angel. Only tip I can give on top of this is make the slides clear and easy to read. Understand that they may be sent electronically, passed around after being photocopied and even faxed so make sure the PPT, just like any good logo can be read just as well in black and white.
Guy Kawasaki and the 10/20/30 Rule
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.
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. If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.
The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:
You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
The majority of the presentations that Guy sees have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. 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. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.
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. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. Guy guarantees it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the he offers an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.
On top of that, make sure the slides are neat, clutter free and able to translate to a black and white format. Forget about fancy photos, leave the over designed horizontal rules and above all else:
Don’t sweat the bullets.