The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
Found this entry from Guy Kawasaki on the rules for a powerpoint presentation.
However, I have another
theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of
entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap:
sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we
have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product”
startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s
a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts
spinning.
Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s in the
venture capital community, I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule
of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have
ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font
smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business,
this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for
example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.
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. (The only difference
between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble
with someone else’s money). 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:
- Problem
- Your solution
- Business model
- Underlying magic/technology
- Marketing and sales
- Competition
- Team
- Projections and milestones
- Status and timeline
- Summary and call to action
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.
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.
The reason people use a small font is twofold:
first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they
think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself
to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make
your presentations better because it requires you to find the most
salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty
points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the
age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s
you’re optimal font size.
So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule
of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience
complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused
the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great
presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.
Technorati Tags: presentation, guy, kawasaki
Technorati Tags: presentation, guy, kawasaki
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