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.
