Six Slides | Hacker News Reader

Six Slides

avc.com

28 pointsChirag11 comments

I think six slides + an actual working MVP with some traction is probably the best proposition for first-time funding.

Keeping your deck to just six slides, when you have nothing else to show might not be the best idea.

My disdain for Powerpoint culture makes me ask, while we're cutting, how about we just drop the six slides and show the product?

You can forward .ppt slides around in larger groups and help provide the context for the product. Also, while investors/partners seem to not always believe the slides they help visualize your thinking on the market opportunity/product e.g.

1. Team - Are the founders going to be able to grow the business, what have they built before.

2. Market - What is the market and how do you frame it. How big is this opportunity? Who are your partners, where are you distributed?

3. Economics - Sales projections, unit economics, how money would be spent (Hiring, marketing, etc.)

4. Competition - Are you aware of the competitors and what is your strategy to compete? How are people solving this problem now why are their solutions not good enough?

5. Pipeline - Your MVP is likely rough, how are you going to improve it? What is the timeline.

Obviously not needed for all projects, but if you need investment or to hook a 3rd party these questions are going to come up and are hard to communicate via product.

Definitely the case where software is part of a solution not the end all product. Key to have a deck for biz dev and other commercial situations.

Your argument is reasonable, I'm just sad that the people who control the money have the cognitive level of 6 year olds.

I guess the person(s) who voted me down haven't read Tufte:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

or Norvig:

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

and assumed I was making some random insult. I'm not.

I suggested something similar not long ago: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/imagine-theres-no-powerpoint-it-...

And it should be reiterated at every opportunity. I just think that the whole Strunk & White like sentiment of paring things down to the minimum that the OP espouses, raises the question - why not 1 slide? And if we get to 1 slide, well, why not 1 bullet point? And then, poof, why do we need slides at all?

"I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." -- Blaise Pascal

This is an interesting pattern! You start with simple and wrong. You improve it, and become complex and right. You master it, and finish simple and right. And then you have six slides.

It seems to happen in every human discipline - writing/speech, math, games, physical activities, philosophy. And many languages have the same kind of word or concept: elegant, sprezzatura, shibumi.

I wonder if there are any good general techniques for minimising the jump in the middle?

That's evolution. Start with something that works, add something else that's available, try it out, then see what you can drop.

So, where are they? Show me the 6 slides so I can see how its done. Sounds like he's blowing smoke.

i am not blowing smoke

i cannot share the slide decks of our portfolio companies for obvious reasons

we are thinking of showing ours that we raised our first VC fund with in 2003 and 2004 but i am not sure how helpful that will be to entrepreneurs

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