The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. 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. 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.

To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. 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. 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.

• Ten slides. 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. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). 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:

  1. Problem
  2. Your solution
  3. Business model
  4. Underlying magic/technology
  5. Marketing and sales
  6. Competition
  7. Team
  8. Projections and milestones
  9. Status and timeline
  10. Summary and call to action

• Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. 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. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

• Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations that I see 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. 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. 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. That’s your optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

Comments

[seksuel]

Although I've only seen a few pitch presentations, I would say that instead of making the rule 10 slides, make it 10 concepts, because sometimes you may want to have say 3 or 4 slides to convey a concept.

That and I've always been a huge fan of the Steve Jobs keynotes. :) Great Article. There are far to many bad presentations out there.

[kolton]

hello guy kawasaki this is AWESOME!!!

[Tina Nguyen]

Have you ever seen Don McMillan's presentation on how to give a PowerPoint presentation? You can find him easily on YouTube. He's a former engineer and now a comedian. He makes good points on how to give a PowerPoint presentation, but in a funny way...

[sernak plywood]

Very good post. I agree that PP presentations should be made as painless as possible

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[Serkan / Tokyotronic]

This rule is really becoming famous. I read about the 10/20/30 rule in the printed version of German business magazine "Wirtschaftswoche" (kind of Business Weekly for German speaking countries).

They covered Powerpoint's 20th birthday and elaborated on Guy's advice in a separate text box (his name was mentioned)!

[gowri]

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[Internet Marketing Blog]

Yikes, I think I have Ménière’s too!

[Articles]

Nice informative article. thanks for sharing and keep sharing such kind of articles, as these articles really helpful for experienced and new comers.
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[Scott Allen]

LOL. Entertaining post, but ultimately great advice on presenting. Being a designer of high-end PowerPoints for several years now, I can say that you are on to something here. It's true about font sizes...people forget when they are laying it out on their screen that the text will look tiny when viewed from a distance, even on a large screen. I especially liked the part about it taking 40 minutes to get a Windows laptop to work with the projector. :)

[Pierluigi Rotundo]

Lol, the PPT company...just doing executive presentations...

Pierluigi Rotundo

[OZ]

This was a great bit of advice..
to the point and precise.. and i thank you for the same..

Wonderfull.. you may have started a new company here..

Thanks

[Pierluigi Rotundo]

How can we apply the 10 20 30 rule to a business plan?

Just thinking...

[Alice]

Thanks for your time and energy. It's refreshing to see somone who is thoroughly excited.
Once again...thanks.

[Isidro]

I suggest to bloggers such as yourself: please get to the point soonest. For example, "The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint: 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." And then the 10 point list. The following text could have the rest, the clever chatter, and other details. There is so much to read these days, I wonder why people post two or three paragraphs of usually not-funny, not-interesting text. At least, I wonder this when I read info-type articles. I read your article for the info, which I liked, and thank you for it. Sorry for my own wordiness.

[Pierluigi Rotundo]

I agree...for this reason you need a great presenter, rather than a great presentation...

[Azdırıcılar]

This regime makes presentations better. Thanks. Still, ppt is a monologue at core - unable to adjust to a welcome, hopefully, new idea-detour that could arise between slide 4 and 5 making 6,7...obsolete.

[Pierluigi Rotundo]

quotin...
Guy -

You recommend (in your book "The Art of the Start") that people only use dark colored backgrounds on PowerPoints. I was always told to only use LIGHT colored backgrounds so that meeting attendees could take notes on the printed presentation. Any thoughts on this?

dear kevin,
i always use a dark background presentation, but when i print it, i add a space with lines for notes:) it's the best way in my opinion!

[Pierluigi Rotundo]

quotin...
Nothing really important can be reduced to power-point.

Would Lincoln have put the Gettysberg Address on Power-Point?

Would Franklin Roosevelt have put anything he ever said in a Power-Point presentation?

Skip the power-point. Look me in the eye and tell me what you want to do. I can understand it without the C.B. DeMille special effects. If you can't explain it without the Power-Point, you don't understand what you want to do.

im my humble opinion, a Powerpoint presentation could help you pitch your idea 1000 times better than pages of business plans...

[Pierluigi Rotundo]

I tested it two days ago...it works!

[Kevin Norman]

Nice article. Also known as "Less is more"

[sampath]

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[games]

Have to say, you’re selling yourself short if you think this is only applicable to entrepreneurs and venture capital. I’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. The most obvious of course is conference lectures. It is becoming more and more common (even in dusty disciplines like mine: literature) to utilize technology in a presentation, and all that you’ve said is true of a venture capitalist is also true of a conference audience. It’s also true, however, in print: particularly in terms of trying to sell yourself to a publisher. Finally, though some of my colleagues forget this, it is true of teaching. Students, whatever we choose to believe, can only digest so much information at a time, can only read print that is so small, and have short attention spans. So you are actually much wiser than you know, but I definitely like the easy formula you’ve created.

[Jaye Ramsey Sutter, J.D.]

Nothing really important can be reduced to power-point.

Would Lincoln have put the Gettysberg Address on Power-Point?

Would Franklin Roosevelt have put anything he ever said in a Power-Point presentation?

Skip the power-point. Look me in the eye and tell me what you want to do. I can understand it without the C.B. DeMille special effects. If you can't explain it without the Power-Point, you don't understand what you want to do.

[Kevin Smith]

Guy -

You recommend (in your book "The Art of the Start") that people only use dark colored backgrounds on PowerPoints. I was always told to only use LIGHT colored backgrounds so that meeting attendees could take notes on the printed presentation. Any thoughts on this?