12 Powerpoint Presentation Rules When Presenting to VC’s

Having raised more than $300 million in numerous financings, I have learned a few rules along the way that help to make strong, effective and impactful presentation.  I have found that VC’s invest, generally speaking,  in three things:  an idea, a top management team, and a big market for the product and service.  In your presentation, make sure these each get a slide.  Your presentation goal is to give them an overview on the investment opportunity and show how you will make money for them.

1. Do your homework: Need to prepare ahead of time and learn as much as you can about the prospective investors, their background, focus areas any particular interest areas, etc’ Any such information could come in handy during the venture capital presentation.  We called one firm who I knew and they were interested in our $10 million financing but their minimum investment was $25 million, — any presentation to them would have been a complete waste of time.
2. Ten slides:  limit the number of slides in your venture capital presentation to ten. This number doesn’t include a full set of alternative backup slides that you would use to address any specific Q&A during your venture capital presentation. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:
   1. The problem you are solving and industry context
   2. Your solution
   3. Business model
   4. Underlying magic/technology
   5. Marketing and sales
   6. Competition
   7. Team
   8. Projections and milestones
   9. Status and timeline
   10. Summary and call to action
3. Less is more on slide content: Each slide should contain one, clear point in a
4. Start with the big picture: Avoid being bogged down in details at the beginning of your venture capital presentation.  Start with the industry trends and why your idea will fit well with the indsutry and where it is going.
5. KISS – Keep it simple —- no jargon or technical terminology that might not be clear to your entire audience
6. Use graphics: A picture is worth a thousand words. Graphics are especially important in conveying new ideas and concepts
7. Make sure your graphics are clear and relevant: Overwhelming graphics may distract the listener from the main idea and unclear graphics with long learning curve may leave your investor baffled.
8. Readable font size: Avoid wordy slides and small fonts. Initial venture capital presentations should deliver a clear and simplified message. Say what you came to say, don’t make your investor read it. The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.
9. 20 Minutes – spare them the details: it is a venture capital presentation, not a white paper! You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
10. Clear financial model – Have a clear financial model that shows how your business makes money
11. Use “bottom line” conclusions on your slides
12. Make a clear distinction between venture capital presentation to be delivered to an audience and handouts: The handout can be longer and contain more details in each slide but the venture capital presentation should focus on your bottom line only.

I like to remember some of the ideas above using the 10/20/30 rule of a PowerPoint presentation. It’s simple to remember: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Dean Tanella