This Marketing Guru from Silicon Valley Explains the Best Way to Present your Startup

In the entrepreneur world, it is said that execution is more important as the idea itself. But to get to the execution part, you need to learn to be able to present your idea first.

However, most entrepreneurs today— regardless of their skills in the startup world — aren’t apt in their ability to present their ideas. Events like the Startup Weekend and much more like it have played an instrumental part in helping entrepreneurs learn the art of presenting, but we still have a long way to go.

Guy Kawasaki, an American marketing specialist, author, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has some tips for entrepreneurs of today when presenting their startups. He wants them to follow a rule known as the “10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint”.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

“A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

10 slides

Kawasaki explains that ten is the ideal number of slides as a normal human being cannot comprehend any more than ten concepts in such a short time. He also recommends the ten topics that venture capitalists focus on:

• Problem
• Your solution
• Business model
• Underlying magic/technology
• Marketing and sales
• Competition
• Team
• Projections and milestones
• Status and timeline
• Summary and call to action

20 Minutes

Guy says that you should wrap up your whole presentation in twenty minutes, even if you have a one-hour time slot. The rest of the forty minutes can be left for discussion and other accidental factors, like troubles with the projector, latecomers, etc.

30-point Font

Most people use a tiny 10-point font on their presentation slides to cram in as much text as possible. This is a big mistake as the audience soon figure out that you are reading from the slides, and as soon as they do so, they will read ahead of you because they can read faster than you can speak. The result? You and your audience are out of sync.

To tackle this, Guy wants you to use a 30-point font that is not only easily readable but will also restrict you to using less text on your slides.

Source — GuyKawasaki

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