"There's a Slide For That" - Generic Slides to Avoid in your Pitch | Hacker News Reader

"There's a Slide For That" - Generic Slides to Avoid in your Pitch

navfund.com

41 pointsbballbackus9 comments

Most VCs have ADHD - they see familiar slide formats and become irritated and impatient. This is also professional disease of many mid-level managers. Several years ago Intel was able to lay off 10000 middle managers to make decision making process shorter.

Not once I had investors looking for 1 millisecond on the slide and telling "Next". Only 5% of the stuff is drawn or written on the slide, I can talk several minutes about it, but VC understand everything from the 1st millisecond ;)

I like people who can ask questions about the contents of the presentation and not only about it's format.

One of the reasons of choosing familiar slide formats (like for example "Competition Quadrant") is that it's familiar, so you can go straight to the content without loosing time to explain the format itself.

tl;dr: please make sure you understand and can speak to each of the slides in your deck, especially these most common ones.

Note that this is very different from the takeaway suggested by the title -- avoid these slides. That may be the poster's opinion, but there is no indication in the article that it is that of the article's author.

The opinion of the article's author is summarized by ths paragraph:

Which started me thinking about the 5 Powerpoint slides we see in every pitch deck. Sure, the slides all look different – different colors, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs. But, basically, they tell the same story. So if and when you use these slides, use them at your own risk – because we’ve seen them before!

Incidentally a great book to teach people how to create useful pictures (both for clarifying your thinking and for presenting) is The Back of the Napkin. Be warned that it it helps you communicate your message effectively, but it does nothing to help your message be more believable.

The book contains an ironic example of this, by telling the story of a fictional company named SAX Inc. He does a very good job of communicating his thinking about this company, its problems, and what it should do. However my knowledge of software development tells me that the plan he came up with has major pitfalls he is not aware of.

Those 5 slides have to cover about 90% of slides in 90% of (business) presentations.

90% of the people giving 90% of business presentations don't know enough of the details or just plain don't have the chops to actually go into detail or back up the assertions they're making.

Utilizing some sort of data-driven process to establish that, "these are our customers priorities" and "we are superior in these priorities" would be black magic to them.

Probably Google's greatest strength is their emphasis on data/empiricism.

I think that is also a weakness at Google. They are great at tracking and processing data, but I don't think they are good at intersecting what that data means with the human priorities behind the data. In other words, they can tell if A > B for existing work, but they don't seem to do very good at telling whether C will be better than A, instead choosing to shotgun and hope enough stuff sticks.

Good product management (which early founders must do) is about determining what data to gather by figuring out why the data is important to the future of the product. It costs money/time to gather and analyze data, so knowing you are gathering the right data is important. In the process, you hope to be able to answer whether C will be greater than A.

>"Being awesome is better than merely being good"

Why yes, yes it is.

Like yourself, I like to mention how great BMWs are when a couple people are discussing deals on used cars.

So what would a VC think of someone who came in with no deck, and just sketched on a whiteboard or paper pad on an easel? The best talks I've been to have been presented that way, with no technology at all. Of course those have been more academic in nature.

well, all the deck goes to the dev/null.

it was crafted reading other advices like this.

well... i think i'll do everything reflected/filpped vice versa upside down on the slides. just that a VC could not say 'oh i saw that before 1000 times just with other names'. will catch their attention, make them think, use a system of mirrors just to read!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com