

"There's a Slide For That" - Generic Slides to Avoid in your Pitch - bballbackus
http://navfund.com/blog/5-slides-we-see-in-every-pitch-deck-or-%E2%80%9Cthere%E2%80%99s-a-slide-for-that%E2%80%A6-%E2%80%9D

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nivertech
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.

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geekfactor
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.

~~~
btilly
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.

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

~~~
alnayyir
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.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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.

~~~
alnayyir
>"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.

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ams6110
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.

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fedd
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!

