I am doing a series of posts about the first VC pitch. If you haven’t already read Post 1 please start here.
So now you’ve told me your bio and how it’s relevant to what you’re
now doing. Now it’s time to start on your PowerPoint deck. I always
liked Guy Kawasaki’s rule he calls 10/20/30. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. It’s a 
very
good rule. In reality you can have 12-15 slides (and other 10 in an
appendix that you only refer to if asked a “deep dive” question”. In
reality you can plan for 40 minutes (but be ready for what you would do
if you only had 20. VC’s are notoriously 20 minutes late to meetings
and if they’re respectful they’ll give you a full 40 minutes to pitch –
but not always). I’m not a stickler for the 30 point font but I would
say … be as visual as possible, don’t use many words, don’t use the
slides as your “crib notes” and don’t put up slides and then say, “I
know this slide is a bit too detailed or hard to read.” The cliched
messages apply: 1) less is more and 2) a picture is worth a thousand
words.
Guy starts his presentation with the problem. I agree that in
general you want to get their quickly but my preferred first slide is
to say in very brief words what you do.
Slide 1 – What you do (very brief): If you’re the company EMN8 ,
for example, you might put up a picture of one of your self-service
kiosks with a Jack-in-the-Box logo (your largest customer) and have the
description, “EMN8 provides self-service kiosks for fast-food
restaurants. Our solutions have been independently measured to deliver
a 15-20% uplift in sales through upsell & cross sell promotions.”
That simple – nothing more. The problem with PowerPoint slides is
that often people put them up feel the need to talk at length to the
slide. If you put up something simple for this first page and then
don’t dwell on it I believe this is most effective. You can click on
the next slide and when you do simply say, “obviously as we progress
we’ll go into more detail about what we do. We just wanted to lay the
groundwork before our detailed presentation.”
Note: Benjamin Satterfield
wrote me after my last post on covering your bio first and he said that
in his experience it is best to get to the product demo as quickly as
possible and (I’m paraphrasing) if you’re demo is good nobody cares to
hear your bio and see a long-winded PowerPoint deck. I agree that this
can be true in certain circumstances. 1) you’re meeting a VC with a
product management background or an ex technology entrepreneur, 2) you
have a GREAT demo and 3) you’re product concept is pretty easy to
understand. My recommended approach for most people is get quickly
through the first few slides in your PowerPoint deck (unfortunately
there is a routine that most VCs expect and this includes seeing
PowerPoint slides). And anyways, if you get quickly through your bio,
what you do and the problem you’re trying to solve … the product demo
will have more impact.
