I suffer from something chosen Ménière's disease—don't worry, you cannot get it from reading my weblog. The symptoms of Ménière's include hearing loss, tinnitus (a abiding ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or booze in one'due south diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I've worked to limit control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture backer, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Almost of these pitches are crap: sixty slides almost a "patent awaiting," "start mover reward," "all nosotros take to do is become 1% of the people in Prc to buy our production" startup. These pitches are so lousy that I'm losing my hearing, at that place's a constant ringing in my ear, and every in one case in while the world starts spinning.

To prevent an epidemic of Ménière's in the venture capital letter customs, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Dominion of PowerPoint. It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than than twenty minutes, and comprise no font smaller than thirty points. While I'm in the venture upper-case letter business, this rule is applicative for any presentation to attain agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

  • Ten slides. 10 is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation considering a normal human being beingness cannot comprehend more 10 concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only departure between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else'southward money). If you must apply more than 10 slides to explicate your business, you lot probably don't have a concern. The 10 topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

    1. Problem
    2. Your solution
    3. Business model
    4. Underlying magic/applied science
    5. Marketing and sales
    6. Competition
    7. Team
    8. Projections and milestones
    9. Condition and timeline
    10. Summary and phone call to activeness

  • Twenty minutes. You should requite your ten slides in twenty minutes. Certain, you have an 60 minutes fourth dimension slot, but yous're using a Windows laptop, and so it will take twoscore minutes to arrive work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early on. In a perfect world, yous give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

  • Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations that I run into have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. Nevertheless, as presently as the audience figures out that y'all're reading the text, information technology reads alee of you lot because it can read faster than yous can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

    The reason people use a pocket-sized font is twofold: showtime, that they don't know their fabric well enough; 2d, they think that more than text is more than convincing. Full bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will brand your presentations better because it requires yous to find the about salient points and to know how to explicate them well. If "thirty points," is too dogmatic, the I offer y'all an algorithm: observe out the historic period of the oldest person in your audition and divide information technology by two. That's your optimal font size.

And so delight observe the ten/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If cypher else, the next time someone in your audition complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, yous'll know what acquired the trouble. One concluding thing: to learn more than virtually the zen of dandy presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.