A man I respect a lot, @guykawasaki, who has worked with Apple, Google and has been behind a lot of great venture projects under Garage Technology Ventures, evangelizes a great approach towards capturing the interested investor or investors, without over-burdening them with unnecessary crap. It’s called the 10|20|30 rule. Simply put, it means:
10 Slides in your presentation
Humans aren’t meant to read more than 10 concepts in a meeting, so 10 is the most optimal number of slides a person can read and internalize. If you need to go beyond 10 slides, it means you can’t articulate your business well enough and perhaps should re-think your venture.
20 Minutes
You have 20 minutes to pitch your 10 slides, allowing the rest of your time to be taken up by questions from the audience. Less is more, and being succinct captures imagination without inundation.
30-Point Font
Don’t have essays up on your slides, use 30-point fonts to force yourself to be concise. More text isn’t more convincing but rather the opposite, it means you are nervous and need to continuously justify your claims and hypotheses.
Instead, fewer text allows for impressions to be embossed in the audiences minds,
Guy suggests you focus on the following points which venture capitalists care about the most:
- Problem
- Your solution
- Business model
- Underlying magic/technology
- Marketing and sales
- Competition
- Team
- Projections and milestones
- Status and timeline
- Summary and call to action