Presentations & Slides

Demo day is the least forgiving stage a founder faces. You get only a few minutes in front of a room, and the investors in it are watching one pitch after another.

Minimalist slides are not a style choice, they are a respect for how attention works.

Animation can make a deck feel alive or make it feel like a 2003 screensaver.

You already have the content. It is sitting on a web page: a blog post, a landing page, a product doc, a research write-up.

A slide is not a page. When people read on screen, they get through about 20 percent of the words on an average visit, and rarely more than 28 percent (Nielsen Norman Group).

People forget words and remember pictures.

You already have the deck. The content is fine, the argument is there, but it looks like it was built in 2005, and you can feel the room lose confidence the moment it goes up.

For a nonprofit, a presentation is rarely just a presentation. It is a grant pitch, a board update, a donor appeal, or a case for support, and it usually has to move someone to give time or money.

People remember how a presentation opens and how it ends far more than anything in the middle.

A slide full of numbers is a slide nobody reads.

Most bad presentations were lost at the outline stage, not the design stage.