Generic investor pitch presentation flow

Here is a story flow that I end up using often for investor pitches of my clients:

• Good idea
• Once, there was a situation
• Something changes/changed

Presentation culture

CEOs are banning PowerPoint presentations from meetings to improve company culture:

“From: Bezos, Jeff

Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 20014 6:02PM

To: [REDACTED]

Subject: Re: No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam
A little more to help with the question…

First time fund pitches

It is easy to create a pitch deck for a first-time investment fund that sounds and looks exactly like a pitch deck for a repeat fund. Introduction of the team, industry perspective on investment opportunities, unique deal flow, active involvement with portfolio companies, and the fund…

Searching slide libraries: Bitlasso Reveal

Most people amass a huge library of PowerPoint and Keynote slides on their computers. File search as a tool to find presentations is collapsing under the load, and searching for a specific slide inside a presentation is impossible. Most people are now…

Most decks are for pre-reading

I browsed through my recent client work and saw that the objective of most decks I design is to get interest as an email attachment. This is a significant change from a couple of years ago.

Triangulating market sizes

It is hard to forecast the size of a market that exists today in a few years. It is impossible to predict the size of a market for a product that does not even exist. Startups working on new products deal with this issue in every investor presentation.

Presenting the conclusions vs the recommendations

Most business presentations present conclusions. You did a ton of analysis, and now you take people through the data and their implications, often using the same slides the team used to get to those conclusions. “Look, here is what we did!”

TED parody

This video of a TED talk parody was uploaded a couple of months ago and I missed somehow. Yes, it is a parody, but in the between the lines (the content is non-existent) it actually shows how body language, pausing and pacing can give you a better stage presence.