Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/american-workforce-100-people/ on Visual Capitalist.

It is very cute, but does not do a good job at communicating the actual data (percentage breakdown by sector). Also, since this graph tries to make the point of diversity, the characters in the illustration do not represent the gender and race balance of the work force.

One idea to tackle this. Add multiple dimensions of data: sector, gender, etc. to the characters, and then render multiple iterations of the 100 people, each time grouped differently to focus on a specific statistic. The opening slide is a random permutation of the entire group.

The circles are cute, but are softening the contrast between the 2 numbers. Two dimensional surfaces look closer together than straight bars, see below.

This is also the reason that I prefer to use stacked columns over pie charts.

They key insight here was to be really rigorous and actually don’t do unimportant, not urgent tasks. The problem though was that all requests added to my desk were important and urgent….

It got stuck in people’s head, and during the following presentations, presenters kept on referring back to frogs in their own talks. Free publicity.

• Attendance at conferences drops during the day, your audience is a lot bigger in the morning

• When people see you speak (early) they are more likely to approach you later, (feedback about) your presentation is an ice breaker

• In conferences, a really short speech is likely better than a long one. You are not here to close the deal, just to start more conversations. Your short speaker slot is a blessing.

On 9xchange, we match buyers and sellers of pharmaceutical drugs that are still in development. Sometimes, a drug no longer fits the strategy of a pharma company, sometimes, a drug fails clinical trials for a specific disease, but might still work for another one.

BenevolentAI has technology to find potential new indications for drugs. Drugs posted on the platform are exposed to its AI engine and results are fed back into 9xchange to broaden the number of matches between buyers and sellers, now taken into account newly discovered indications for which this drug might work.

Over the past years (decades for some) we have become so used to seeing PowerPoint slides with the built-in fonts, standard color palettes, that most people will recognize it instantly. But when your end product is a screenshot, you don’t have to worry about things like font compatibility and presentation templates.

• Change colors and fonts to match the document you are working in

• Let go of the restrictions of the aspect ratios for a slide (4:3, 16:9) and pick something that is appropriate for your diagram.

This article in the NYT though, was pretty effective. Representing unused office space with repetitions of well-known landmarks. People can instantly relate to, understand, and internalize the amount of space we are talking about.

(BTW, these illustrations are made by Kaylie Fairclough)

But hey, I am probably the only one worrying about this…

AI can bring a solution here. Invest time in developing a standard prompt that generates the desired setting for your photo, then apply that same prompt consistently with small variations to get your snaps.

Databases of image prompts are starting to pop up (see a list here, writing this in May 2023) and this trend might well be the beginning of the end of stock image sites and even model agencies.

• Don’t expect much text editing, explaining, or pitching from your contact. Yes, she know your company. Yes, she knows what you want from the introduction. The person to whom it gets forwarded has little idea. Do the hard work for her.

• Writing the intro line for her (“I had a coffee yesterday with my good friend, and it struck me that the customer segment targeting positioning of their value proposition exactly matches or long-term vision for the business unit”), is likely going to have the line “See below, interested?” above it.

• You are pitching for the next interaction with the person you get introduced to, not the closing of the deal itself. On the one hand, this will make writing this email a lot simpler, on the other hand, it means that you have make it super personal and relevant, a standard pitch won’t do it.

When the business or the business model is a bit unusual, things go wrong. The 2 parties, and their lawyers (that’s 4 entities) can easily get confused. People think they understand, but they do not.

The solution: negotiate based on a sketch or a slide layout and use an imaginative case example with some made up, but realistic numbers. It is easy to refer to the year 3 sales redistribution commission as “those $42k”. Everyone knows what you are talking about.

After all this, the deal can be put in writing.

Still there is a difference in “hacking” some quick results in a demo and having a stable product that can be used in the front line of presentation design.

These features have all to do with the automatic generation of layouts and story lines. Further out in the future though, there might be other applications that can replace the slide deck as the central tool to pitch ideas.

1. Visualizations. A layout of data and/or elements with relationships that show something that is very hard to explain in linear text. Reading out all the columns of a data table is boring. Explaining the structure of DNA in words is impossible

2. Background graphics. A nice picture or a few words that fill up that giant screen on stage and makes the overall picture frame (you + slide) look a lot better

3. Trackers. A favorite of management consultants: some sort of table of contents that reassures you were we are in the overall story.

4. Transcripts. Bullet points mapping 1-on-1 what the speaker is saying.

Think about when to use which one for what.

Complex visualizations might not work as a dramatic background image when you reveal your product. Background graphics will not say much in a document that you email without explanation. Trackers don’t say anything. Transcripts are horrible on stage, but might work when emailing to someone (i.e., a text document).

It is because of things like this (design is hard to capture in rules) that I think a ChatGPT-like algorithm for page layouts might have a big potential.

The deck obviously worked, because the company managed to raise the $50m round. But I doubt that the slides in the deck were the key driver of this success. They slides look decent, but this is not stellar design. The purple branding seems a bit off from the corporate colors, some slides contain “white paper speak” that is typical in enterprise software, and the graphics between the slides are not completely consistent.

Honeycomb is a later-stage software company which can easily be x-rayed by investors who understand software: growth rates, CACs, etc. etc. It is the numbers (which are not in this deck but were shared in later-round due diligence discussions) that will reveal exactly where the company is going.

The important pitch is probably the “audio track” along side the slides: Honeycomb has managed to carve out a new software category that is/will become a key component of every enterprise’s IT budget. I am sure the CEO nails this in an in person presentation.

Always put other company’s pitch deck design and outlines in the context of your own company.

Think about this when designing slides, switch to a multi-column grid, or simple leave space unused left and right of your text (something that many web pages do), see the examples below.

A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.