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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
