Yeah - I just love eye catching titles...

Rick posted about an almost unbelievable presentation he received from an up and coming (or not so) entrepreneur. It seems the guy broke every rule in the book including;

• Sending the presentation as a mail merge - with mock personalisation and different fonts for the individual parts
• About three times the length necessary
• Including the slides specific to different audiences - VC, Angel, Grant - all with different figures
• A bunch of different examples - some contradictory, some unsavoury and few relevant

I've written a few business plans in my time - and always come away thinking that they smelt of snake-oil salesmanship. I mean everyone knows that market size is always exaggerated, competitive threats downgraded. Revenue potential multiplied and profitability magically magnified.

Even the details of the founds tend to be semi-fictitious. A year spent drinking and waxing lyrical abut Proust ends up being partial completion of a CompSci degree while working on startup ideas and training for extreme endurance events. And the advisors I mean how many advisory boards can Robert Scoble, Loic le Meur and the Google brothers (like the Marx brothers but not in monochrome) sit on?

And from here comes the joy that many of us feel in the 2.0 world. It's easy to get the real low down on the founders, its only a few keystrokes work to research the competitors, there's no doubt a bunch of bloggers with in-depth knowledge of the true market size and hell, Scoble will probably give you an honest opinion anyway.

So ditch the multipage preso - it's gone the way of bell bottomed trousers and hedge funds - I like my presos, while not complying with Twitter brevity, to come in one page, easily digestible and above all truthful format.