However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ears, and every once in while the world starts spinning.
To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint presentation training. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this PowerPoint presentation training rule is applicable for any presentation training to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.
PowerPoint Presentation Training Rule #1: Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are, contrary to popular belief, very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). Here's a presentation training tip: if you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:
- Problem
- Your solution
- Business model
- Underlying magic/technology
- Marketing and sales
- Competition
- Team
- Projections and milestones
- Status and timeline
- Summary and call to action
PowerPoint Presentation Training Rule #2: Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take at least forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if the setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late to presentation training, and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you'll give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
PowerPoint Presentation Training Rule #3: Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentation training PowerPoints that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you, because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of sync.
The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. The PowerPoint presentation training rule says: Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, then I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience, and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.
So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint presentation training. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem.
