Self destructing presentations

Many presentations degenerate over time. What started fresh, clean, and straight to the point gets diluted over time.



More people start editing the presentation. They do not understand all the slides 100%, so they add bubbles and bullet points with text just to make sure…

Making bullet points look good

Yes, you heard it from a pro: sometimes bullet points are hard to avoid!

• In a document meant for reading rather than presenting
• In a quick internal presentation that is more a decision document than a heart and mind…

Sales vs. investor presentations

As long as the content is right in an investor presentation, you probably will get away for poor graphics design. Even if you did not manage to draw that banana perfectly, the audience will get the point. It even shows that you are a prudent CEO of an early-stage company…

CV language

While at McKinsey I spent a lot of time interviewing candidates. The main challenge in a first interview was to cut through the woolly CV language and build a picture of the real person in front of me. Strategic problem solvers, team workers, risk seekers, people persons, big picture people, all these…

Check list vs. stories

When you ask a VC what to include in your pitch, she will instantly produce a check list with menu items. But taking this check list and use its components as the chart headings for your pitch deck will make a boring story. Grocery shopping lists have not won Pulitzer prices (yet)…

The PGDN test

Many investors will scroll rapidly with the page down key through a presentation that is attached to an email. They will skip the cover letter in the email body (too much text), they will skip the dense summary page one of the presentation (too much text) and will continue to scroll down your slides…

How to explain magic

Some technology solutions appear to be magic, almost too good to be true. Complicated algorithms that are hard to apprehend for example. Your audience might not believe you, because they cannot understand it, you are trying to sell snake oil. How to pitch magic?

Background overload

Professors, researchers, and teachers like to start their lectures with an extensive discussion of the background and/or context of an issue. Talking about the background is useful if it adds to the story, if it does not it is boring content that fills up those important first minutes of your…