Three Slides Then Shut Up — The Art Of The Pitch
This week, we look at pitches, at the stories entrepreneurs tell investors. The best pitches aren’t really pitches. Dumping one’s entire body of knowledge on easily bored investors won’t help. The best pitch is one that quickly moves from monologue to conversation.
The First 70 Minutes of The Hour. When, in 2002, I was invited to join the ranks of venture investors by Barry Weinman, my Gentleman Capitalist mentor, I voiced a concern: I didn’t want to go blind looking at PowerPoint presentations for the rest of my life. Gentleman that he is, Barry didn’t — and didn’t need to — remind me of the two hours investment pitches I had inflicted on his kind during my early entrepreneur days.
I finally learned to curb my prolix talk during the Be IPO road show in 1999. The investment bankers who helped prepare the show soundly disabused me of my prolix ways. I was relegated to the clean up position, following the VP of Marketing, our experienced CFO (three IPOs before ours), and the demo. Putting me last before the hard stop enforced concision.
Now that I’ve joined the VC brotherhood and am on the receiving end of money-seeking tall tales, I can attest that my fear of mental cauterization by PowerPoint wasn’t misplaced. I’ve found a name for the blight: The First 70 Minutes of The Hour.
The condition is caused when an entrepreneur uses the allotted hour to dump everything he or she knows about his/her business. I’m a sinner reminiscing: I’m anxious, I’m unsure which of the product’s many arcane features and benefits will click, I’m terrified that I’ll leave something out. My desperation induces acedia as the allotted hour ticks past, and, as a reward, I receive non-committal California-speak: Great, Interesting, We’ll Circle Back To You.
This is an unfair caricature, but not by much. Too many presentations concentrate on the needs of the speaker instead of addressing the interests of the audience. Fortunately, there’s a simple remedy: Show three slides and shut up. Say just enough to engage us and then move on to a lively conversation, to questions, arguments, suggestions.
The canonical three slides go like this:
- Who we are: The founding team’s résumé, its technical, business, and academic background.
- A nice, sharp dichotomy: The world before us, the world after us. Show a substantial, practical impact, not just a marginal improvement of something that’s already in place. The more impossible or unthinkable the better — it will become retroactively obvious once understood. The mouse is a good example.
- The Money Pump. Your business plan. I like the Money Pump image, the pipes that allow the cash that’s temporarily residing in customers’ pockets to flow into the company’s coffers — legally, willingly, and repeatedly.
After that, shut up.
The silence will be unbearable. It might help to look down at your shoes, your hands, something on the conference room table. But the awkward moment won’t last, no more than an interminable 12 to 15 seconds. If you don’t get questions, you have your answer: We’re not interested.
But if we poke holes in your story, demand explanations, play devil’s advocate, we’re hooked. You may now dig into the 253 backing slides you have under the table, whip out the market research, competitive analysis, academic studies, financial projections, and casually lay out your roadmap. Show us that you’re not afraid to think on your feet. You can even gently flatter us that we’re the visionaries, you just want to help make that vision a bit clearer.
You’re either in or you’re out, but you won’t have wasted our time or yours.
There are benefits to this approach even if we don’t buy your pitch.
If we’ve turned you down, you can call us back six months later, remind us of your “failed” three-slide presentation and offer to show us three new ones. If the first pass was quick and painless, we might ask you back in. You won’t get this welcome if you bored us for 70 minutes the first time around.
Moving forward, sharpen your internal characterization of your business. You can’t have ten success factors that are equally important. Concentrate on the top level features in your Before/After slide and leave the “really cool” pet tricks for the ensuing conversation. Remove the branches that blur the picture, but don’t hack away at the graphical details in your slides. Edward Tufte, the world’s pre-eminent “data visualizer”, has posited the counterintuitive notion that by adding visual cues we enhance comprehension. (We’ll get back to Tufte in the postscript.)
And the most important benefit: If you’ve distilled your presentation into three slides, you won’t even need them. The effort will have been so intense that they’re now burned into your brain. You can walk into a conference room, ask for a white board and a marker, and impress us with your command of your business by “extemporaneously” drawing the three slides. There will always be time to whip out your laptop, tablet, or big smartphone for the 253 FAQ (Foire Aux Questions, in French) slides.
All of this is easier said than done, of course. I can relate to anxious entrepreneurs who have a hard time sorting through the wonderful ideas brewing inside the garages in their heads. Afflicted with what Buddhists call monkey brains, I, too, have a hard time quieting the noise so I can “hear” the most important, reality-changing element of a product/service/business. Only the most gifted and focused (or perhaps the most delusional) can see the edge of the blade with unfailing clarity. The rest of us muddle through.
One point remains: The goal of the presentation is to start a conversation, the sooner the better.
Speaking of presentations, you might want to read Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, a searing indictment of mindless slide presentations ($7 paperback on Amazon):
(Also available in PowerPoint, er, PDF format here)
Tufte’s seminal work, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information ($29.62 for the hardcover edition on Amazon and also, it seems, in PDF form here), includes this celebrated chart that tracks Napoleon’s ill-fated march to and from Russia during the abominable Winter of 1812–1813:
The chart makes the French Army’s unimaginable losses imaginable.
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