How to Change the World

The Art of the Introduction

Just got back from Houston where I spoke for the Houston Technology Center. Houston has, by far, the funniest Web 2.0 babes in the world: Jenny Lawson of Good Mom/Bad Mom and The Bloggess; Laura Mayes of Digg for Chicks, aka Sk*rt; Erica O'Grady of Reinventing Erica; Tracey Lee Wallace of True Light Resources; and Carrie Pacini of OpMom. This is what Jenny was going to use to introduce me until she chickened out. (This is a picture of her getting ready for the event, by the way.)

My name is Jenny Lawson and I write for The Bloggess and Good Mom/Bad Mom on the Houston Chronicle. I was pretty shocked when they asked me to introduce Guy because most people know that I’m unable to talk for more than fifteen seconds without cursing inappropriately so it’ll be a pleasant surprise for all involved if I can manage not say the c word or start talking about "vaginas" up here.

Guy Kawasaki first came on my radar several months ago when our pseudo-editor, Dwight Silverman of the Chronicle, emailed to tell us that our parenting blog had been picked up by Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site and that this was “very significant.” And actually it was very significant, both because the recognition was nice and also because it marked one of the first emails I got from Dwight that didn’t tell me to stop using the F word or posting inappropriate dildo videos on the Chronicle. So, being a typical southern gentlewoman, I decided to email Guy and thank him, which I did. It was an email which may have included a few curse words and ended with me telling Guy I had no idea who he was and asking if he was the guy who invented the motorcycle.

Unsurprisingly, Dwight was not pleased. But surprisingly, Guy actually wrote me back and thus began months of email correspondence between us. Granted, it was somewhat one-sided, with me sending long, rambling emails about lap dances and my paraplegic cat and Guy sending back short one-liners such as his most recent email to me which stated simply “Very funny dick story. Your bizarre business proposal needs work.” Which? He’s right on one part.

So I decided I should find out who this guy actually is and why when I tell people that he’s emailing me half of them stare at me blankly and the other half totally freak out and pee themselves in excitement. I decided to look on Wikipedia because that shit is always accurate and here’s what I found out:

Guy Kawasaki did not invent the motorcycle. He did, however, invent the Internet. Or maybe something to help the internet. I’m really not sure because I got bored and stopped reading. Then when he was thirty he killed a drifter and totally got away with it. I’m not entirely certain that’s true but it makes for an interesting story. And really? (*long stare at Guy*) Prove you didn’t kill a drifter. You can’t. I rest my case.

But none of that really matters (except to the drifter’s parents who were probably pretty broken up about the whole affair). What does matter though is that Guy Kawasaki kicks ass. That Guy Kawasaki is totally famous. That Guy Kawasaki is a genius who looks a little like Jackie Chan and could probably take you out with a roundhouse kick if he wanted to. And, most importantly, that Guy Kawasaki is here with us tonight.

So without further ado, I give you…Guy Kawasaki.

Now that is an introduction. You can see a video of the event here.

"Everything you should know about me as an entrepreneur you could learn from my OB/GYN"

An email pitch from an entrepreneur named Sherry Couch of BizNiche brought a big smile to my face. First of all, how could I skip an email with a subject line like this one: “Everything you should know about me as an entrepreneur you could learn from my OB/GYN”? Sherry went on to write:

1. I am very good at conceiving an idea.

2. I can commit to something mind, body, and soul for at least nine months.

3. I have the ability to over come adversity, such as eating healthily while puking all day.

4. I can adapt quickly to changing and expanding situations.

5. I stay focused and motivated even with a lack of oxygen to my brain.

6. I am creative: Did you know with satin pajamas and satin sheets you can roll over in bed even with an extra sixty pounds.

7. I am patient—ever known anyone ten months pregnant?

8. I am cool under pressure: I gave birth to a ten-pound baby without a C-section or a properly functioning epidural and did not curse out my husband.

9. I am resilient: I went back to work at my company four weeks after giving birth.

10. I create meaning in the world! Even with all the trials and tribulations of becoming a parent I have chosen to do it twice so far because each new life gives hope and meaning to our world. Just like each new business.

Children are the ultimate startup. And when they leave for college, it’s their IPO. And when they get married, it’s an M & A deal. And like most startups, these milestones usually take longer and cost more than you predicted. Parental success rates, however, are much better than even the best (seed-stage) venture capitalist’s.

Ten Questions With Garr Reynolds

All hail Garr Reynolds! He has written the definitive book about making great presentations: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter). To give you a taste of his book (and increase my link count), here are ten questions (really thirteen) with Garr.

1. Question: Who indexed your book? I know I’m in it, but I’m not in the index . Of course, it does say something about me that I would look for my name in the index. :-)

   Answer: I was horrified when I saw that! A thousand apologies. I since learned a good piece of advice for new authors: Always do your own indexing or at least be very involved in it. The indexer did a very good and quick job, so it was my fault for not checking and adding a few names and page numbers to subjects. The index was designed to be light to save space, but not that light. Live and learn.

2. Question: Okay, now that we got that out of the way, what is the “Presentation Zen” approach?

   Answer: Presentation Zen is indeed an approach not a method. There are many paths and many methods to presenting insanely well today. At its heart Presentation Zen is about restraint, simplicity, and a natural approach to presentations that is appropriate for an age in which design-thinking, storytelling, and “right-brain thinking” are crucial complements to analysis, logic, and argument.

   The goal of the book was not to offer panaceas and rigid rules, but instead to encourage people to think differently about their visuals, the way they present them, and how they connect with audiences. My hope is that people find some things new in the book that stimulate their creativity--helping them to discover a more “enlightened” and more effective approach to presenting.

3. Question: How did we get to this place where most presentations suck?

   Answer: There are many reasons. First of all, presenting exceptionally well isn’t easy. In fact it’s hard. That’s why we find great presenters—and great communicators in general—so remarkable. They are all too rare. Many professionals simply have never had much practice and just follow conventional wisdom and do it “like everyone else” instead of doing it effectively.

   PowerPoint and Keynote are both pretty simple tools, but there has been too much focus on the tools themselves. If people want to learn how to make better slides they should study good books on graphic design and visual communication to improve their visual literacy.

   When it comes to designing appropriate visuals, there is a hole in our education. Concerning quantitative displays, for example, very few people have had proper training in how to design graphs and charts, etc. The great master Edward Tufte has written many useful books in this regard.

4. Question: Are PowerPoint and Keynote part of the problem or part of the solution?

   Answer: There is no question that PowerPoint has been at least a part of the problem because it has affected a generation. It should have come with a warning label and a good set of design instructions back in the ’90s. But it is also a copout to blame PowerPoint—it’s just software, not a method.

   True, the templates and wizards of the past probably took most of us—who didn’t know any better anyway—down a road to “really bad PowerPoint” as Seth Godin calls it. But today we know better, and we can make effective presentations with even older versions of PowerPoint—often by ignoring most of the features. Ultimately it comes down to us and our skills and our content. Each case is different, and some of the best presentations include not a single slide. In the end it is about knowing your material deeply and designing visuals that augment and amplify your spoken message.

5. Question: In a nutshell, what makes a good presentations stick?

   Answer: If you want to know how to make better presentations, buy Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers found that sticky, compelling, and memorable messages and ideas share six common attributes: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. Ask yourself how your presentations rate for these elements, and you are on your way to crafting presentations that stick.

6. Question: Specifically, what makes Steve Jobs’s presentations so great?

   Answer: Steve Jobs makes it look easy. He’s comfortable and relaxed. This in turn makes the audience feel relaxed. His keynotes usually rate very high on the Heath brothers’ “sticky scale” above. Steve also speaks in a manner that is conversational, and even though he practices a lot before the event, his words never sound scripted.

   Steve uses the slides to help him tell a story, and he interacts with them in a natural way, rarely turning his back on the audience because monitors in front show the same onscreen image as well as the next slide. Steve uses visuals, his own words, and a natural presence to tell his story. His visuals do not overpower him, but they are an important component of the talk. Steve also demos his own software. This is much harder than giving a presentation, but he pulls it off well. How many CEOs can do that?
   

7. Question: Do you think that Bill Gates (a) knows his presentations are lousy and doesn’t care or (b) doesn’t know they are lousy at all?

   Answer: Who knows? Historically, Bill has been a good contrast in styles to Steve Jobs. In the past we said, “Do it more like Steve and less like Bill.” The thing is, one-on-one Bill seems very engaging and very likable, but he has always struggled with the keynote address. The awful slides behind him usually do not help.

   I wish Microsoft would call Bert Decker for some coaching and hire Duarte for the visuals. If Duarte can make Al Gore an extraordinary presenter, think what they could do for Bill. Bill is a remarkable man, not just for his software so much as for his philanthropy and his work with his foundation. So it would be nice for a remarkable man like Bill to be a remarkable presenter too. His CES keynote was better—not great, but an improvement. Perhaps Bill will abandon the all too common common “death by PowerPoint” method in future.

8. Question: What’s your version for the optimal number of slides, length of presentation in minutes, and font size?

   Answer: It really depends on a great many things, but if I was going to make a pitch to a venture capitalist, I’d probably recommend your 10/20/30 method. That is, the presentation should have about ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than about thirty points. I especially like the twenty-minute limitation of this method.

   There are myriad types of presentation situations and the actual number of slides and the time may vary greatly depending on the specific circumstances and method. However, the audience should have no idea how many slides you have. Once they start counting slides all is lost. As far as text goes, I say as little as possible on slides, but when text does appear it should be large and serve to complement your words. People did not come to read; they came to hear. Any speaker can read bullet points. The audience wants to hear your story not read it.

9. Question: How many slide transitions should a presentation contain?

   Answer: It’s good that PowerPoint and Keynote have many transition options, but people need to exercise restraint and use a very few effects. I suggest using no more than two to three different types of transition effects per presentation and not use transition effects for every slide. I use a fade to black between the major sections of a talk to communicate closure of one section and the opening of the next one.

   I often use a smooth dissolve to gently move from one visual to the next as I continue speaking. Using no transition effects is also often appropriate. When you watch a film or a TV show you are not usually aware of the transition effects from one scene to another--that would be distracting. Audiences should not notice the effects we employ between slides too.

10. Question: Why do you think 2-D graphs are better than 3-D graphs?

    Answer: 3D charts and graphs are very popular with consumers, but in almost every case it is preferable to use 2-D graphics to display 2-D data. Charts with 3-D depth and distortion usually make things harder to see, not easier. Some of the precision is lost. There is beauty in the simple display of the data itself, there is no need to decorate with distorted perspectives. If the graphic is just for showing the roughest of general trends, then there is nothing really wrong with a 3-D chart I suppose, but when you are trying to show a true visual representation of the data in the clearest way possible, a simple chart without 3-D adornment is usually better.

11. Question: How many times do you think a person should rehearse a presentation?

    Answer: You should rehearse at least three to four times all the way through and rehearse the first three minutes at least ten times or more. You also need to do a formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers who can give you constructive criticism.

    In some ways good presenting is like good writing, you’ve got to pare it down and dump the superfluous and the non-essential. But since we are so close to the material it is hard for us to see what works and what does not, or what is repetitive, etc. This is why you cannot only rehearse alone. You’ve got to rehearse in front of others so that you can experience the nerves, the blank stares, etc.

    The more you rehearse the more the fear of the unknown is removed. The more the fear is removed, the more confident you will become. As you become more confident you will feel more relaxed and your confidence will shine through. The thing about confidence is that it’s impossible to fake, but with practice you will indeed become a confident speaker. And yes, it is possible to rehearse too much. You want it to sound natural and fresh, not mechancial and memorized. Usually three to four full rehearsals will get you there.

12. Question: What is the single most important thing people could do to enhance their presentations?

    Answer: Turn off the computer, grab some paper and a pencil, and find someplace quiet. Think of the audience. What is it they need? What is it you want to say that they need to hear. Identify what’s important and what is not. You can’t say everything in a twenty-minute talk—or even a two-hour talk.

    The problem with most presentations is that people try to include too much. You can go deep or you can go wide, but you can’t really do both. What is the core message? This time “off the grid” with paper and pencil or a white board is where you can clarify your ideas and then get them on paper visually. After your ideas and basic structure are clear, then you can open up the software and start laying out the story in the slide sorter view.

    If the computer ever freezes in your live talk you need to move on. The work you did in the preparation stage “off the grid” and away from the computer will help make things concrete in your own mind so that you can move forward sans your Macintosh in the event of a technical glitch. By the way, if you ask the audience to bear with you as you try to make the computer work, you might as well stick a fork in it because you are done. Keep moving forward in the unlikely event of a technical glitch.

13. Question: Who are the ten best presenters?

    Answer: I have pointed to many on my site over the years such as Seth Godin, Steve Jobs, you, Al Gore, Lawrence Lessig, Tom Peters, Hans Rosling, and many more. Recently I have come to think that US senator Barack Obama is an amazing speech maker as well. But more than anything, I point people to TED where they can see some really good presentations and speeches by some very smart and creative people who are all trying to change the world in their own way. Each case is different, but really, if you’re not trying to change the world, what is the point of making a presentation?

Best and Worst Communicators of 2007

Bert Decker, executive coach extraordinaire, announced the ten best and worst communicators of 2007. He named Mike Huckabee the best communicator and Alberto Gonzalez the worst one. Click through to see the other winners and losers. Even I made the list, but I won’t tell you if it is as a winner or a loser.

Personal Branding MP3s Now Available

The recordings of the “A Brand You World - 2007 Global Telesummit” are now online as MP3s and iTunes Podcasts. It includes people like Jason Alba, Richard Bolles, and Andy Sernovitz. If you want to learn how to market yourself, check them out.

Data Visualization

My buddy Laura Fitton pointed me to a terrific explanation of visualization techniques. The article is called “Data Visualization: Modern Approaches,” and it’s in Smashing Magazine.

The techniques and uses examined are mindmaps, displaying news, displaying data, displaying connections, displaying websites, articles & resources, and tools & services. This picture is an example from Time that the article used.

In ten years of watching entrepreneurs pitch their companies, I can recall maybe two companies using any of these techniques. Every other one either (a) used no graphics at all; (b) used a 2 x 2 matrix and guess what: they’re always in the upper right corner; or (c) used a matrix and guess what: they’re always the column with the most checked-off stuff.

If you like Smashing’s explanation of visualization techniques, you’ll probably also enjoy “45 Excellent Blog Designs.”

How to Talk to the Press

Here’s a video featuring editors and reporters from the Wall Street Journal, Wired, TechCrunch, Seattle Times, and Seattle Post Intelligence discussing how entrepreneurs should pitch the press. You can also read the wrap up if you’re too busy to watch the video. Also, here's a video featuring only Michael Arrington from November, 2006.

The short story: Create something great, throw out all the marketing bull shiitake, and explain it in thirty seconds.

The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing

Lois Kelly is the author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. This is her explanation of the top nine types of stories that people like to talk about. If you’re pitching your company to investors, customers, partners, journalists, vendors, or employees and you don’t use at least one of these story lines, you probably have a problem. And most likely you’re too close to what you’re doing, so you think that you’re uniquely “patent-pending, curve-jumping, and revolutionary.” :-)

1. Aspirations and beliefs. More than any other topic, people like to hear about aspirations and beliefs. (This may be why religion is the most popular word-of-mouth topic, ever.) Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy’s point of view about ending the digital divide is aspirational as is Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s views about how companies can grow by reducing pollution and creating more sustainable business strategies. Aspirations are helpful because they help us connect emotionally to the speaker, the company, and the issues. They help us see into a person or company’s soul.

2. David vs. Goliath. In the story of David and Goliath, the young Hebrew David took on the Philistine giant Goliath and beat him. It is the way Southwest Airlines conquered the big carriers, the way the once unknown Japanese car manufacturers took on Detroit, and the way social media is taking on the media giants. Sharing stories about how a small organization is taking on a big company is great business sport. Rooting for the underdog grabs our emotions, creates meaning, and invokes passion. We like to listen to the little guy talk about how he’s going to win and why the world—or the industry—will be a better place for it.

3. Avalanche about to roll. The mountain is rumbling, the sun is getting stronger, but the rocks and snow are yet to fall. You want to tune in and listen to the “avalanche about to roll” topic because you know that there’s a chance that you will be killed if caught unaware. This theme taps into our desire to get the inside story before it’s widely known. It’s not only interesting to hear someone speak about these ideas, they have the ingredients for optimal viral and pass-along effect.

4. Contrarian/counterintuitive/challenging assumptions. These three themes are like first cousins, similar in many ways but slightly different. Contrarian perspectives defy conventional wisdom; they are positions that often are not in line with—or may even be directly opposite to—the wisdom of the crowd. The boldness of contrarian views grabs attention; the more original and less arrogant they are, the more useful they will be in provoking meaningful conversations.

   Counterintuitive ideas fight with what our intuition (as opposed to a majority of the public) says is true. When you introduce counterintuitive ideas, it takes people a minute to reconcile the objective truth with their gut assumption about the topic. Framing views counter to how we intuitively think about topics—going against natural “gut instincts”—pauses and then resets how we think and talk about concepts.

   Challenging widely-held assumptions means that when everyone else says the reason for an event is X, you show that it’s actually Y. Challenging assumptions is good for debate and discussion, and especially important in protecting corporate reputation.

5. Anxieties. Anxiety is a cousin of the avalanche about to roll, but it is more about uncertainty than an emerging, disruptive trend. Examples of anxiety themes abound: (1) Financial services companies urging baby boomers to hurry up and invest more for retirement: “You’re 55. Will you have your needed $3.2 million to retire comfortably?” (2) Tutoring companies planting seeds of doubt about whether our kids will score well enough on the SATs to get into a good college. Although anxiety themes grab attention, go easy. People are becoming skeptical, and rightly so. Too many politicians, companies have bombarded us with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with no facts to back up their point.

6. Personalities and personal stories. There’s nothing more interesting than a personal story with some life lessons to help us understand what makes executives tick and what they value the most. The points of these personal stories are remembered, retold, and instilled into organizational culture. Robert Goizueta, the respected CEO of Coca-Cola, said he hated giving speeches but he was always telling stories—often personal ones about how he and his family had to flee Cuba when Castro took control and had nothing more than his education.

   Similarly, when Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to Stanford University in June 2005, he shared his personal story and life lessons. That commencement address, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” was talked about on thousands of blog and was published verbatim in Fortune magazine. It helped us see Jobs in a new light.

7. How-to stories and advice. Theoretical and thought-provoking ideas are nice, but people love pragmatic how-to advice: how to solve problems, find next practices, and overcome common obstacles. To be interesting, how-to themes need to be fresh and original, providing a new twist to what people already know or tackle thorny issues like how to get IT and marketing organizations to work together despite deep culture clashes between the two.

8. Glitz and glam. Robert Palmer sang about being addicted to love. Our society is more addicted to glamour and celebrity. Finding a way to logically link to something glitzy and glamorous is a surefire conversation starter. For example, tagging on to the widespread interest in the Academy Awards, Randall Rothenberg, former director of intellectual property at consultancy Booz Allen-Hamilton, last year talked about the similarity and challenges between creating new “star” product brands and movie stars.

9. Seasonal/event-related. Last, and least interesting but seems to resonate, is tying your topic into seasonal or major events. Talking about industry predictions around the New Year, advertising during SuperBowl season, executive compensation reform when an executive of a well known company “resigns” with an especially bloated compensation package are examples of this type of story.

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Here’s a good exercise for your team: Have it read this posting and then answer the question: What story line does our marketing currently use? Then, if you’re brave enough, ask the question: What story line should our marketing use?

Bite Your Tongue: Eight More Ways To Improve Your Presentations

There was such a positive response to the speaking tips of Doug Lawrence (email) that I asked him for more stuff. Taking a cue from the fact that “Bite your tongue” was the most popular tip, here are more:

1. Warm-up with a towel. Singers often have to get their chops “up” in their hotel rooms before leaving for rehearsals or performances. They do this by screaming and yelling into a towel.

2. Just say “Whoooo!” One of the best ways to get a voice ready to talk or sing is to make a siren sound on “whoooo” from the lowest pitch you can make to the highest and back again. Repeat it several times. This obnoxious sound thins your vocal cords and makes them more supple for easy speaking or singing.

3. Flutter your lips. Blowing a pitch—any pitch—through your lips to make them flutter will loosen up your articulators: the tongue, lips, and throat muscles. When your voice is tired and husky, and you’re afraid you can’t go on—give this a shot. It will work wonders.

4. Eat light, eat protein. If you have to eat before a big presentation (singers prefer going in lean and mean), eat stuff that gives you energy, not a cheap high like carbs. Singers always party after the show!

5. Allocate three hours to wake up. Singers often take a nap in the afternoon before they perform, but they always allow at least three hours to get their brain and voice back. Getting to a wakeful state takes a lot longer than just putting your clothes on.

6. Skip the tea. Tea is an astringent and will close your voice down. Drink hot water instead—it keeps your voice supple as a baby’s cheeks (either set).

7. Leave your jaw out of it. If you use your jaw to speak, you will exhaust your voice. Jaws don’t sing, and they don’t speak. Don’t try to over-form your words by chewing them because you’ll be outrageously tired within a few minutes. Use your articulators (tongue and teeth) and leave your jaw for a nice meal after you speak.

8. Don’t overwhelm the audience. Be entertaining but use moments of silence, soft speech, and slow cadence. Any performer will tell you the trick to a really great performance is to make the audience come to you. The more you go after them, the more you push them away. When people watch Steve Jobs, they think they know what he’s going to do, but he titillates them until they can barely stand it and makes the audience come crawling to him.

Art of Innovation Online Video with PowerPoint Slides

I know that you might be sick of my Art of Innovation speech, but Zentation has created a very good way to view a PowerPoint-based speech that shows both the speaker and the current slide. Here is a sample to show you how it works.

Speaking as a Performing Art

My buddy Doug Lawrence has been a professional singer, music director, and speech coach. He is a highly respected concert artist having sung for almost forty years in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, and throughout Europe with conductors like Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson-Thomas.

In the last forty years, in addition to singing, he’s done tons of speaking in front of groups of all sizes. Here’s the big surprise: Singing and speaking have everything in common—except for maybe really good tunes. The main goal is to engage your audience and make them listen to you, so everything a singer does, a speaker ought to do too. Here are the absolute necessities of an engaging performance or presentation that Doug compiled for me:

1. Circulate with your audience. Before every concert, speech, and seminar, I try to mingle with the crowd, ask questions, and let them know I’m glad they came. This isn’t always possible in the real world, but when it is, I have an opportunity to feel a bond with the people I’m about to perform for and undo some of the jitters that are a natural part of being “on.”

2. Command attention. The breastbone (sternum) has to be high if you want to project authority. You might want to pretend you’re a rooster showing off. Relaxed sternum = loser, high sternum = winner!

3. Snarl. If people can’t hear you, they won’t listen to you. Add some nasal resonance to your voice, but keep smiling. Snarl is that nasal sound you get when you speak partially from your nose instead of your mouth. It generates overtones above 2,800 cycles per second that make any room “sing.” Pretend you’re trying to yell/warn a child that’s about to run out in front of a bus—like yelling, “STOP!” This works whether you’re using a microphone or speaking without one

4. Bite your tongue. If your mouth gets dry in the middle of your presentation, try gently biting your tongue. Opera singers use this all the time to release saliva which moistens your mouth.

5. Always perform a sound check before you speak. A good sound person will adjust the EQ to your voice and its idiosyncrasies. If you’re comfortable using a hand mike, do so—work close to the mike and you’ll have a better chance of being heard. If you turn your head, make sure you turn the mike with your head. Lapel mikes usually work fine, but for softer speakers they’re very frustrating. Wrap-around mikes (such as the AKG C520L—$159) that fit over your ear are the best for intelligibility. If you speak often and you know your venues will support this technology, buy a really good one and take it with you.

6. Use your eyes all the time. Hand gestures, pacing around the platform can all be useful tools in presentation, but the eyes…ah, the eyes have it! If you can’t engage people with your eyes you will eventually lose your audience’s attention. Your eyes always tell people whether or not you believe in what you’re saying! Scan the room, select a person to make a point to, and look right at them. It’s a little intimidating for them, but it keeps you focused on the individuals who make up your audience. Keep moving to new people—right, left, middle—it works! If all else fails, look at each person as though you’ve loved him or her all your life—like mom, or your child.

7. Move away from center to make your point. When you come to a place in your presentation where you really want people’s attention, move to the left or right of your primary speaking position. This will always make people look up at you. If you are a constant mover or shaker, stand still for a few moments—it will have the same effect.

8. Get quiet. If you really want to get people’s attention, get quiet suddenly. It will scare the sound guy to death, but I guarantee the audience will pay attention. Singers use this trick all the time. That’s the “you could hear a pin drop” effect. Believe me, that’s what sells your talk!

9. “Underline” certain words with a pause or repetition. If you really want to make a point, slow down, pause, and say the word or phrase that you most want people to hear with a calculated emphasis on each word. The sudden switch in style gets attention. Also try repeating a word or phrase before you make your big point. For example: “You know (pause) you know (pause) you know, the thing I want you to remember is…” Songs are full of repeated text, a device that locks down meaning!

10. Take a risk and be vulnerable. Say or do something that’s totally out of character for you. Use a “pretend” voice like Mickey Mouse or Barry White for effect while you’re telling a joke or saying something shocking or humorous. Whether your persona is reserved or funny, it’s endearing to have a little fun. This trick humanizes the most serious topics.

11. Tee it higher. Raising the overall pitch of your voice for a few seconds will create urgency. It shows your passion for the subject matter and also relaxes your exhausted larynx. Low pitched voices relax the room—high pitched voices increase the adrenaline flow of the audience.

12. Know when it’s time to go. You don’t have to be a genius to know you’ve overstayed your welcome. Check your “presentation barometer” often to see if everyone is still with you. Change something—anything—if you’re starting to lose the crowd. If all else fails, stop talking, start thanking, and get off the platform. People will love you more for knowing when to stop than for all the wonderful content you brought to your topic!

13. Use Q and A as an “encore.” Singers usually prepare an encore because this practice makes the audience feel special and makes them think you like them more than other audiences you’ve encountered. Q and A functions something like an encore. You may think you told them stuff they needed to know, but questions often reveal the important things you left out of your content. Where this opportunity exists, use it as a tool for picking up the pieces you left dangling in your talk and warm the crowd to your candor and self-effacing graciousness.

14. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. That’s how I got to Carnegie Hall! Where possible, memorize your material like singers memorize their songs. Remember, the more you rehearse, the freer you will be to make your talk fresh and engaging.

15. Perform for a hero. Several years ago I was asked to sing a command performance for the Queen of Spain. I worked harder on that concert than any I have ever sung. It was very successful and I was proud of my preparation. From that time on I imagined I was about to sing for the queen, it made me twice the performer I had been previously. Pick a hero, and give them your best shot!

Doug is a presentation coach; you can reach him via email.

Visual Representation of the US Federal Budget

I love cool graphs. Here’s a visual representation of the federal budget. Guess what that big blue circle is on the left side of the chart.

Make a List and Check It Twice: A Real-World Guide for Speakers and Presenters

Pam Slim provides a great list of things to do prior to making a presentation. If you make speeches, presentations, or pitches, you need to read this.

Here’s one more power tip: Show up with your own Countryman E6i microphone. (And tell your host that you need a Shure or Sennheiser body pack.) This has two effects. First, you will be using a great microphone.

Second, you will impress the audio-visual dudes backstage. These folks can make your presentation go a lot smoother—or tank it—so you want them on your side. And few things will impress them more than a speaker who carries his own E6i.

World's Best Presentation Contest Winners Announced

Slideshare.net announced the winners of the World's Best Presentation Contest today:

Winners (chose by judges)

1. ShiftHappens by Jbrenman

2. Meet Henry by Chereemoore

3. Sustainable Food Lab by Chrislandry

People’s Choice Winners

1. PaniPuri--An Introduction by Thakkar

2. ShiftHappens by Jbrenman

3. Meet Henry by Chereeemoore

The commonality you’ll see in these winners is big fonts, big graphics, and a “storytelling” orientation. These are three crucial qualities of a good presentation.

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How to Get the Attention of a Venture Capitalist

At the Elite Retreat I gave an off-the-cuff answer to a question concerning getting the attention of venture capitalists. My buddy Wendy Piersall blogged about my answer, and it was a very popular. However, to truly help entrepreneurs, I’d like to provide a cogent list of the tips to get the attention of a venture capitalist.

1. Get an introduction by a partner-level lawyer. He should work at a firm that does a lot of venture capital financings like my buddies at Montgomery & Hansen. Best case email/voicemail: “This is the most interesting company I’ve seen in my twenty years of legal work for startups.” Venture capitalists dream about calls like this—it’s the equivalent of a scoring shot that knocks the goalie’s water bottle off the top shelf.

   Incidentally, this part of the reason of why you should pay top dollar and use a well-known corporate finance attorney instead of Uncle Joe the divorce lawyer (even if he handles venture capitalists’ divorces). You’re paying for connections not only expertise.

2. Get an introduction by a professor of engineering. Best case email/voicemail: “These students are the smartest ones I’ve ever had in twenty years of teaching computer science. Larry and Sergei would have carried their backpacks for them.” Arguably this is even better than the lawyer’s call if the school has a history of receiving multi-million dollar donations from its alumni—if you know what I mean.

3. Get an introduction by the founder of a company in the venture capitalist’s portfolio. Best case email/voicemail: “My buddies are starting a new company, and I think it’s really cool.” For this to work, it would help if the person making the call is a successful company in the venture capitalist’s portfolio. Also, this would be a good time to tap your network in LinkedIn to find acquaintances in the portfolio.

   Here’s a power tip regarding getting to venture capitalists using LinkedIn. Maybe it’s only me, but I hate when a connection of a connection of a connection wants me to take a look at deal. LinkedIn enables you to just go direct, and that’s my advice if you can show success (see below). If you can’t show success, the connection of a connection of a connection is useless anyway.

4. Show success. Suppose you can’t get any of the introductions mentioned above. Then the most compelling email/voicemail that you provide is this: “My buddy and I have been working in our garage, taking no pay, and with MySQL we built a site that is doubling in traffic every month. Right now, we’re at 250,000 page views a day after thirty days.” With this one sentence you’ve proven you can (a) make a little bit of money (“none”) go far, your architecture looks scalable so far (once in my career I’d like scalability to be a problem), and most importantly, the dogs are already eating the food.

   Another way to show success is to hit it out of the park at Demo or the poor man’s Demo we call Launch: Silicon Valley, but this is a game that only a few dozen companies can play in every year. Finally, you can provide links to articles singing your praises, but this only means that you fooled the press, not that the dogs like what you’re serving.

5. Make sure your company is in the right space. No matter how you get to the venture capitalist, make sure that she is the right one for you. For example, if you have the cure for cancer, contacting a firm’s enterprise software guru isn’t the brightest idea, so get on the web and do your homework.

6. Use a short email. The ideal length of your email is three or fourth paragraphs:

   • What does your company do?

   • What problem are you solving?

   • What’s special about your technology/marketing/expertise/connections?

   • Who are you?

   Here are some things not to do:

   • Attach a PowerPoint presentation. I don’t care if it even adheres to the 10/20/30 rule. Save it for the face-to-face meeting.

   • Use the word “patented” more than once. All it takes to file a patent is $1,000. No good venture capitalist believes patents makes your company defensible. They just want to learn (once) that there might be something worth patenting.

   • Claim that you’re in a multi-billion dollar market. Isn’t every company in a multi-billion market according to some study? At least every company that’s ever pitched a venture capitalist.

   • Provide a lofty financial projection. Most projections that I see show how you’ll grow faster than Google. Frankly, I wouldn’t provide any projection at all. It will be either too low and make your deal uninteresting or too high and make you look delusional.

   • Brag about an MBA degree. Most venture capitalists want to invest in hardcore engineers at the start. The MBAs can come later, so focus on engineering or avoid the subject completely.

   • Try to create the illusion of scarcity. Many entrepreneurs claim that “Sequoia is interested.” If Sequoia is interested, you should take its money. If it isn’t, then the venture capitalist won’t be either. Either way, don’t even think of blowing this smoke.

This posting is merely about the process of getting across the moat. To learn more about what to do once you’re there, read how to fix your pitch by Bill Reichert of Garage.

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The World's Best Presentation Contest

SlideShare.net, a site for sharing PowerPoint presentations, today announced The World’s Best Presentation Contest. The judges are a “who’s who” of presentation gurus: Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds, Jerry Weissman, and me.

Contestants upload their presentation files to Slideshare.net, and people from anywhere can rate the entries. Their votes will determine the “People’s Choice” winner. The four judges will select the winners of the contest. Prizes include an Alienware laptop with Windows Vista, XBox 360s, and iPods.

I hope you’ll enter. You should check out my perspective as well as those of my fellow judges, Bert, Garr, and Jerry, to improve your chances!

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More TED Talks Are Available

More TED Talks are now online—though not the ones from this year. The last time I blogged about TED Talks, I made that claim that Majora Carter was as good as Steve Jobs and that created a controversy.

One of my favorites is Richard St. John’s. It’s from 2005, but it’s still highly relevant. He gives a great definition to CRAP. The quality of these videos is so high that you will be thanking BMW for sponsoring them and won’t mind the BMW ad in the beginning.

(Thanks to Bill Meade for pointing out these videos.)

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Founders at Work

This is a picture of my copy of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It has broken my record for the “book with most stickies.” My system is that the stickies on the top edge are ideas for my next book, and the ones on the side are ideas for this blog.

As you can see, it’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship. Here is a list of some of my favorites. The major lesson: Entrepreneurship is all about tactics, hootspah, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. You’ll LOL at points and wonder if a better title would not have been Flounders at Work.

1. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.”

2. Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.”

3. Mitch Kapor (Lotus Development) on how much money he asked for from Sevin-Rosen. “I think I said probably $2 to $3 million. We had nothing. We hand an early-stage under-development spreadsheet, and me and Jon Sachs. So that was the biggest number I felt I could ask for without being totally absurd.”

4. Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’”

5. Tim Brady (Yahoo!). “The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in May of ‘95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We were laughing, ‘How many pages to the gallon today?’”

6. Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion) on the importance of recruiting students. “’…What’s important to me are the signs on the back of the building.’ Of course, everyone recoiled from that. I explained to them, ‘I don’t really care if anyone else knows where the building is. All I want is the students to know where the building is.’”

7. Mike Ramsay (Tivo): “I remember one weekend, we took the entire company, what was about 60 people at the time, and we divvied them up and went to all the Fry’s stores in the Bay Area, because they were selling at Fry’s. We set up demo stations and the employees were giving demos. It was great because almost everybody had no experience of what it’s really like to sell in a retail store.”

8. Paul Graham (Viaweb): “Neither of us knew how to write Windows software, and we didn’t want to learn. It seemed like this huge steaming turd that was best avoided. So the main thing we thought when we first had the idea of doing web-based applications was, ‘Thank God we don’t have to write software on Windows.’”

   On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

9. Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”

10. Brewster Kahle (Thinking Machines): “The blessing of Thinking Machines and the curse of Thinking Machines was that it had a lot of money. If you have a lot of money, then you can be detached from people that are going to pay you in the future.”



11. Chuck Geshke (Adobe) on the reaction of the spouses of Xerox execs to a demonstration of PARC technology in 1977: “They loved this stuff. They sat down and played with the mouse, they changed a few things on the screen, they hit the print button and it looked the same on paper as it did on the screen. They said, ‘Wow, this is really cool. This would really change an office if it had this technology.’”

    [This is why you should always listen to your wife. And if you’re a woman, you should never listen to your husband.]

12. Ann Winblad (Open Systems). “So I get in front of these 60 or 70 guys and these guys are probably all in their 50s and I’m in my 20s, and we had a ‘blue light special,’ where we said, ‘If you give me a check today for $10,000, you can have unlimited rights to one of our modules.’ …I went home with, I think, like 12 or 15 of these $10,000 checks in my purse.”

13. James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”

On using his parents to moderate the pictures: “I originally had my parents moderating since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it was going. He said, ‘Oh, it’s really interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and a girl and another girl and they were doing…’ So I told Jim, ‘Dude, my parents can’t do this any more. They’re looking at porn all day.’”

On his newfound dating success with hot women: “All of a sudden Hot or Not happened, and I was starting to date all these attractive women. I got a taste of it, and I realized that looks don’t make up for a good personality. Many of these girls were annoying. They were fun to hang out with, but I couldn’t have a conversation with them.”

[IMHO, James is the funniest person in the book.]

14. James Currier (Tickle). “When we started the company, we wanted to change the world, and we had all these tests on the site to help people with their lives. We had the anxiety test, the parenting, relationship, and communications tests. And no one came. …’Let’s do a test for what kind of breed of dog you are.’ …We put it online and 8 days later we had a million people trying to enter our site.”

15. Mena Trott (Six Apart) on early meetings with the current CEO of the company, Barak Berkowitz. “Barak said, ‘That’s great for a niche or personal lifestyle business, but we’re not interested in investing in that.’ At first we thought, ‘Who is this asshole? Why is he saying that to us?’”

These are just a few nuggets. The whole mine is what you should get.

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Sermon Back Online

The Nancy Ortberg sermon called “Jesus & Your Job” is now back online. Watch it and reap.

The Gift of Work

I heard a sermon this morning called “Jesus & Your Job” by Nancy Ortberg of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.

This is a wonderful example of a powerful message delivered in a powerful way. It contains an excellent description of what makes good leaders and how to derive the maximum value from one’s work. I doubt that you can spend twenty minutes in much better ways than listening to or watching this sermon.

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Frame or Be Framed

George Lakoff is a professor at U.C. Berkeley Linguistics Department. He’s written a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant His message in this interview concerns how Republicans appear to be good “framers” and Democrats are lousy ones. Here are two questions from the interview:

Question: How does language influence the terms of political debate?

Language always comes with what is called “framing.” Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like “revolt,” that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That’s a frame.

If you then add the word “voter” in front of “revolt,” you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like “voter revolt”—something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Question: Do any of the Democratic Presidential candidates grasp the importance of framing?

None. They don’t get it at all. But they’re in a funny position. The framing changes that have to be made are long-term changes. The conservatives understood this in 1973. By 1980 they had a candidate, Ronald Reagan, who could take all this stuff and run with it. The progressives don’t have a candidate now who understands these things and can talk about them. And in order for a candidate to be able to talk about them, the ideas have to be out there. You have to be able to reference them in a sound bite. Other people have to put these ideas into the public domain, not politicians. The question is, How do you get these ideas out there? There are all kinds of ways, and one of the things the Rockridge Institute is looking at is talking to advocacy groups, which could do this very well. They have more of a budget, they’re spread all over the place, and they have access to the media.

Right now the Democratic Party is into marketing. They pick a number of issues like prescription drugs and Social Security and ask which ones sell best across the spectrum, and they run on those issues. They have no moral perspective, no general values, no identity. People vote their identity, they don’t just vote on the issues, and Democrats don’t understand that. Look at Schwarzenegger, who says nothing about the issues. The Democrats ask, How could anyone vote for this guy? They did because he put forth an identity. Voters knew who he is.

This isn’t a political blog (not that my saying this is going to affect the comments but you already know that I believe in open commenting). My goal is to draw lessons from linguistics and apply them to business because it is a very useful marketing technique. For example, “a music-listeners revolt” would imply that record companies are unfairly ruling people who listen to music. This beats the heck out of “piracy,” and the company who provides “relief” for this oppression is logically a hero.

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If you play hockey and are within fifty miles of Colorado Springs, please send me an email because I’m looking for a game.

The Art of Visualization

Check out this excellent compilation of visualization methods called “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.” This came to my attention via a convoluted path from BoingBoing (who thanks Mike Love) to Seth Godin to Acorn Creative. Ralph Lengler and Martin J. Eppler created it. You might also enjoy reading their paper, entitled “Towards a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management”

On a related topic, some people are lucky enough to have the ability to transform the spoken word into graphics in real time. I gave a speech to the International Coach Federation, and Martha McGinnis created this graphic representation of it. You may find this useful as a quick summary of my Art of Innovation speech (you can watch the speech online here). Here is Martha’s chart in two sizes:

• 1024 x 558 (348K)

• 4075 x 2217 (7.4M)

And I just found out about this mind map of the book at Anabubula.com.

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"The Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2006"

Communications coach Bert Decker just named the ten best and worst communicators of 2006. To whet your appetite, here is the ten worst list:

1. Nancy Grace

2. Barry Bonds

3. Mel Gibson

4. Ray Tillerson

5. Lindsay, Paris, Britney, and Nicole

6. Senator George Allen

7. OJ Simpson

8. Shaquille O’Neal

9. Rosie, Katie, and Meredith

10. George Bush

Check out his ten best here. 7 is a lucky number, I hear. :-)

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The Entrepreneur's New Year's Resolution: "I Will Fix My Pitch"

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for entrepreneurs: ”I will fix my pitch.“ And here’s a suggestion on how to do this written by Bill Reichert, my colleague at Garage Technology Ventures.

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Endless articles, books, and blogs have been written on the topic of business plan presentations and pitching to investors. In spite of this wealth of advice, almost every entrepreneur gets it wrong. Why? Because most guides to pitching your company miss the central point: The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate.

Pitching is about understanding what your customer (the investor) is most interested in, and developing a dialog that enables you to connect with the head, the heart, and the gut of the investor. If you want advice about pitching, you can ask a venture capitalist, but you probably won’t get a very good answer. Most VCs are analytic types, and so they will give you a laundry list of topics you should cover. They won’t tell you what really “floats their boat,” mainly because they can’t articulate it in useful terms. “I know it when I see it,” is about the best answer you’ll get.

What is the investor most interested in? Contrary to popular belief, the venture capitalist sitting at the other end of the table glaring inscrutably at the presenting entrepreneur is not thinking, “Is this company going to make a lot of money?” That is the simple question that most entrepreneurs think they are answering, but they are missing the crux of the venture capital process. What the investor is really thinking is, “Is this company the best next investment for me and my fund?” That is a much more complex issue, but that is what the entrepreneur has to pitch.

So, the pitch has to accomplish three things:

• Provide a good, clear, easy-to-repeat story—the story of an exciting new startup.

• Fit with other investments the individual venture capitalist has made and the investments the firm is chartered to make.

• Beat out the other investments the firm is currently considering.

These latter two issues are beyond the scope of this modest guide. So for now, let’s just concentrate on telling a good story.

Tell a Good Story

Most of the articles on pitching are generally right about the topics, even if they miss the nuance (sell, don’t explain). But don’t take any template as graven in stone. Your story may require a moderate, or even a dramatic, variation on the list of presentation slides (listed below). You may need to explain the solution before you can explain the market; or if you are in a crowded space, you may need to explain why you are different than everyone else early on in the conversation; or you may want to drop some very impressive brand-name customers before you explain your product or your market. The one thing you may not do is expand the number of slides to twenty (or thirty or fifty)! Other than that, let the specifics of your situation dictate the flow of your slides.

Nevertheless, it is useful to have a guide. With the caveats above in mind, here is a basic outline for your pitch:

• Cover Slide: Company name, location, tagline, presenter’s name and title. If there are multiple team members participating in the pitch, put names on the next slide instead. Key objective: Everyone in the room should know the basic value proposition of the company, including the target market, before the next slide is shown. All the words should not be on this slide, but reinforce and extend the tagline orally so that that everyone has a foundation for what is to come.

• Intro Slide: Team. The three or four key players in the company. For some reason, everyone puts the team slide at the end, but investors want to know this at the beginning, and it is common courtesy to make sure everyone is introduced. But make this short, crisp and relevant. This is not the time to share everyone’s life story, or detail the resumes of all six members of the advisory board. Focus on a significant, relevant accomplishment for each person that identifies that person as a winner. In ten to fifteen seconds, you should be able to say three or four sentences about your CTO that says everything the investors want to know about him or her at that moment. Key objective: Investors should be confident that there is a good credible core group of talent that believe in the company and can execute the next set of milestones. One of those milestones may be filling out the team, and so it is important to convey that the initial team knows how to attract great talent, as well as having great domain skills. If there is a gap in the team, address it explicitly, before investors have to ask about it.

• Slide 1: Company Overview. The best way to give an overview of your company is to state concisely your core value proposition: What unique benefit will you provide to what set of customers to address what particular need? Then you can add three or four additional dot points to clarify your target markets, your unique technology/solution, and your status (launch date, current customers, revenue rate, pipeline, funding needed). Key objective: Flesh out the foundation you established at the beginning. At this point, no one should have any question about what it is that your company does, or plans to do. The only questions that should remain are the details of how you are going to do it. Another key objective you should have achieved by this point in your presentation is to make sure that if there are some compelling brand names associated with your company (customers, partners, investors, advisors), your audience knows about them. Feel free to drop names early and often—starting with your first email introduction to the investor. Brand name relationships build your credibility, but do not overstate them if they are tenuous.

• Slide 2: Problem/Opportunity. You need to make it clear that there is a big, important problem (current or emerging) that you are going to solve, or opportunity you are going to exploit, and that you understand the market dynamics surrounding the opportunity—why does this situation exist and persist, and why is it only now that it can be addressed? Show that you really understand the very particular market segment you are targeting, and frame your market analysis according to the specific problem and solution you are laying out. In some cases, however, the problem you are attacking is so obvious and clear that you can drop this slide altogether. You do not have to tell investors that there are a lot of cell phones out there or that teenagers like to socialize. Save yourself, and them, the pain of the obvious.

• Slide 2.1: Problem/Opportunity Size. Even if your market opportunity is not obvious, you can assert the size of your opportunity on slide 2. Sometimes you may need a slide to clarify the factors that define the size and scope of the opportunity, particularly if you are going after multiple market segments. There may be a unique market dynamic or emerging trend that requires explanation. Do not use this slide to quote the Gartner Group or Frost & Sullivan; show that you really understand where your prospective customers are from the ground up.

• Slide 3. Solution. What specifically are you offering to whom? Software, hardware, services, a combination? Use common terms to state concretely what you have, or what you do, that solves the problem you’ve identified. Avoid acronyms and don’t try to use these precious few words to create and trademark a bunch of terms that won’t mean anything to most people, and don’t use this as an opportunity to showcase your insider status and facility with the idiomatic lingo of the industry. If you can demonstrate your solution (briefly) in a meeting, this is the place to do it.

• Slide 3.1. Delivering the Solution. You might need an extra slide to show how your solution fits in the value chain or ecosystem of your target market. Do you complement commonly used technologies, or do you displace them? Do you change the way certain business processes get executed, or do you just do them the same way, but faster, better and cheaper? Do you disrupt the current value chain, or do you fit into established channels? Who exactly is the buyer, and is that person different than the user?

• Slide 4. Benefits/Value. State clearly and quantify to the extent possible the three or four key benefits you provide, and who specifically realizes these benefits. Do some constituents benefit more than others, or earlier than others? These dynamics should inform your go-to-market strategy, and your product/service roadmap, which you will discuss later.

• Slide 5. Secret Sauce/Intellectual Property. Depending on your solution, you might need a separate slide to convince investors that no one else can easily duplicate or surpass your solution (assuming that’s actually true.) If you are in a business sector in which intellectual property is important, this is where you drill down into your secret sauce and proprietary technology. Again, boil this down to simple elements and terms, devoid of jargon. Do not walk the audience through a guided tour of your detailed product architecture. Instead, highlight the elements of your technology that give you unique potential for leverage and scale as you grow. If you do slides 4 and 5 well, it will be easy to make the case for your...

• Slide 6. Competitive Advantage. Okay, so how are you better than everyone else, including the status quo? Most entrepreneurs misunderstand the critical objective of this slide, which is not to enumerate all the deficiencies of the competition (as much fun as that may be.) Just because you have really cool technology, secret sauce, and intellectual property does not mean you will win. Other factors like domain expertise, high-level connections, and special relationships with customers, vendors, and other companies also play a part. Your key objective is to convince the investor that lots of folks will buy your product or service, even though they have several alternatives (one of which may be to do nothing), for very good reasons.

  The best way to convince an investor is to have referenceable customers or prospects who will articulate in their own words why they bought or will buy your offering over the alternatives. Use this slide to summarize the three or four key reasons why customers prefer your solution to other solutions and to the status quo. Many entrepreneurs have been coached to use a four-square matrix that shows that they are in the upper right-hand quadrant, but this has become a joke in the venture community. Check-boxes are better, if they are not abused. Make sure your check-box criteria reflect the market’s requirements, not just your product’s features.

• Slide 6.1. Competitive Advantage Matrix. Depending on how important the analysis of competitive players is in your market segment, you may need a matrix to provide a detailed list of competitors by category. Preferably, you develop this as a “pocket slide” to be used for Q & A, if necessary. It is important, however, that you do your homework on the competition, and that you don’t misrepresent their strengths or their weaknesses.

• Slide 7. Go to Market Strategy. The single most compelling slide in any pitch is a pipeline of customers and strategic partners that have already expressed some interest in your solution—if they haven’t already joined your beta program. Too often this slide is, instead, a bland laundry list of standard sales and marketing tactics. You should focus on articulating the non-obvious, potentially disruptive elements of your strategy, or you can frame your comments in terms of the critical hurdles you need to get over, and how you are going to jump them. If you don’t have a pipeline, and there is nothing unique or innovative about your strategy, then drop this slide and make the elements of your sales model clear in the discussion of your business model (next slide).

• Slide 8: Business Model. How do you make money? Usually by selling something for a certain price to certain customers. But there are lots of variations on the standard theme. Explain your pricing, your costs, and why you are going to be especially profitable. Make sure you understand the key assumptions underlying your planned success and be prepared to defend them. What if you can’t sustain the price? What if it takes twice as long to make each sale? What if your costs don’t decline over time? Some investors will want to test the depth of your understanding of your business model. Be ready to articulate the sensitivity of your business to variations in your assumptions.

• Slide 9. Financial Projections. The two previous slides above should come together neatly in your five-year financial projections. [Bill and I disagree here. I think a five-year projection is impossible.] You should show the two or three key metrics that drive revenues, expenses and growth (such as customers, unit sales, new products, expansion sales, new markets), as well as the revenue, expense, profit, cash balance, and headcount lines. The most important thing to convey on this slide is that you really understand the economics and evolution of a growing, dynamic company, and that your vision is grounded in an understanding of practical reality. Your financials should tell your story in numbers as clearly as you are telling your story in words. Investors are not focused on the precision of your numbers; they’re focused on the coherence and integrity of your business plan.

• Slide 10. Financing Requirements/Milestones. It should be clear from your financials what your capital requirements will be. On this slide you should outline how you plan to take in funding—how big each round will be, and the timing of each—and map the funding against your key near-term and medium-term milestones. You should also include your key achievements to date. These milestones should tie to the key metrics in your financial projections, and they should provide a clear, crisp picture of your product introduction and market expansion roadmap. In essence, this is your operating plan for the funds you are raising. Do not spend time presenting a “use of funds” table. Investors want to see measures of accomplishment, not measures of activity. And they want to know that you are asking for the right amount of money to get the company to a meaningful milestone.

• Summary Slide. This slide is almost always wasted. Most entrepreneurs just put up three or four dot points about how wonderful their investment opportunity is. Generally the words are the same words that investors hear from scores of other entrepreneurs, such as, “We have a huge opportunity, and we will be the winners!” Your key objective on this slide is to solidify the core value proposition of your company in words that are memorable and unique to your company. If the venture investor in the room has to give a short description of your company to his partners, these are the words you want used. This is a good place to reinforce your tagline, or mantra—the short phrase that captures the essence of your message to investors. The best solution to creating your summary slide is to imagine that this is the only slide you will ever be able to present. If you had to do your whole pitch in one slide (with 30 point font), this is that slide.

So here we have a good general outline for pitching your company. But remember, it’s about selling your investment proposition, not about covering points. Don’t get fixated on using this or any other template. You should know the issues about your company that investors are most concerned about. Those are the issues you need to concentrate on. Make sure you address all the predictable “burning questions” as early as you can in your presentation, even if it means violating the sequence above.

Tips On Effective Pitching

How do you turn a pitch from a monolog to a sale? Make sure every point you make connects with your audience. Keep your text very, very short. Really. Please. Use charts and pictures if you can. And engage your prospect. Ask questions. “Do you think this market opportunity is interesting?” “Have you seen anyone else addressing this problem?” “Do you think CIOs would be interested in a solution like this?” You may get some tough responses, but you will know a lot more about what is going on in the investor’s mind, and you will be engaging them in your story—instead of letting them play with their Blackberries under the table.

Some additional tips to improve the effectiveness of your pitch:

• Make sure that everyone in the room is introduced. Rarely do entrepreneurs ask the investors in the room to introduce themselves. While it is appropriate to be familiar with each investor’s bio (assuming it is on the web), it’s fair to ask something like, “What investments have you been looking at recently?” And if there are some other faces in the room, you should absolutely have them introduce themselves and provide a little background.

• Don’t use a feel-good, visionary “mission statement” on your overview slide. Mission statements have also become a joke in the venture industry. It’s like saying, “Our projections are conservative.” Focus on making sure your statement of your company’s value proposition is crisp, clear, and unique.

• Prepare good use cases. Sometimes, no matter how simple and clear the description of a product, what the investor really needs is a concrete example of how people will actually use it. In some cases there will be multiple different use cases. You may need to outline these to get your point across.

• Drop names, early and often. If you really have some brand names involved in your company—as customers, as partners, as members of the team—don’t keep them a secret for the first nine slides; make sure the investor knows about them early in the presentation. Be prepared for the investor to contact every single name you drop—whether it’s a person or a company. If you are going to drop names, they had better be real.

• Make sure you can tell the entire story in ten to fifteen minutes. Even if you have time, your total presentation should be no longer than twenty minutes. You want to have time to engage the investors and discuss their questions or concerns. If you think you have additional critical points that have to be made, prepare “pocket slides” that you can put up if the topic arises.

• Do the math. Average entrepreneur pitch: thirty-eight slides. Average VC attention span/cranial capacity: ten slides.

• Learn how to control the flow of the meeting, without seeming inflexible or anxious. Watch and listen. Body language and questions will tell you if you are okay deferring a point or if you need to address it immediately. If you let your audience take over the flow, you will probably wind up creating a confusing, incomplete impression of your company. But if you don’t address the “burning questions” early and effectively, the investors won’t hear anything else you say.

• Don’t lie. You would think this goes without saying, but in their enthusiasm for their creations, entrepreneurs tend to slip across the line all too often. Please do not interpret our exhortation to “sell” as an endorsement of hype, exaggeration, misrepresentation, spin, or lying. The best salespeople are credible and trustworthy. It is more important that investors trust you than that they understand every nuance your business.

• You don’t have to be “conservative,” but you do have to be realistic. Most entrepreneurs fail to be realistic about how long things take in the real world (versus the spreadsheet world). Whether it’s the time to complete product development, or the time to close the next ten sales, entrepreneurs are pathologically optimistic. As with your financials, find examples of comparable challenges addressed by other companies, and use that data in your model.

• Don’t put so much text on a page that the investor has to read it. Everything should be short, content-rich bullets in a font large enough to read without squinting. The words are simply reinforcement of the points you are making. Pictures, graphs, and charts should be uncluttered and make clear, compelling points. If they have to be deconstructed and explained piece by piece, you will lose focus and momentum.

• Don’t use your presentation stack as a standalone document. It is perfectly okay if it is not readable when you are not around. That’s the job of your executive summary or your business plan. If you are looking for a guide to writing an executive summary, you can find our version online: “The Art of the Executive Summary.”

A good pitch is rare because it is so hard to execute on everything else that has to be done to build a successful company. But the ability to pitch is a key indicator for investors—if the entrepreneur doesn’t know how to sell, how can he or she build a great company?

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