

Presentation and Pitching Skills for Entrepreneurs - immad
http://www.immadsnewworld.com/2010/03/presentation-and-pitching-skills-for.html

======
lotharbot
Related to "confidence": you should be completely comfortable with your
material. In fact, you should have mastery over it.

Nothing kills a presentation faster than someone in the audience asking "where
did you get that number / equation / data?" or "why did you choose that
technology / layout / structure?" and the presenter not knowing. People aren't
going to trust you with their money if you don't understand what you're
telling them well enough to answer probing questions.

~~~
patio11
I had a professor in college who, unlike many professors in college, had
actually worked for a living. He imparted on me the following panacea for all
questions you cannot answer (not related to the startup context but I think
you can make it work): "That's a good question which deserves a more thorough
answer than the one I'm prepared to give you off the top of my head. Let's
follow up on it later."

It suggests that you have sufficient confident mastery of the field to know
that you don't know the answer off the top of your head but that somebody on
the team has a satisfactory answer, suggests you know the answer isn't a
threat to you, and allows you to control the pacing and direction of the
presentation.

~~~
carbocation
That answer and its brethren are very good answers. However, they become
progressively less useful each time you use them in the same presentation.
They are useful when you essentially _do_ have mastery over your material, and
you will therefore not need to dodge most questions with them. In fact, they
are useful because, if used in the most sincere and literal way, they are a
compliment to the person who asked the insightful question.

(Of course, they are bad answers to the basic question about provenance asked
by the GP - if someone was asking you where you got Graph X and you don't
know, telling them that you'll talk with them later will be treated as the
dodge that it is, not as a compliment.)

