Eye on Entrepreneur > PowerPoint Pitch

Back to main

Once you have scheduled the meeting with a prospective investor and you decide to make your passionate pitch with a PowerPoint presentation, I suggest you adhere to the strategy recommended by venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki. He calls it the “10/20/30 Rule.” I love the approach because it fits perfectly with my philosophy of high intensity, short duration.

The 10/20/30 Rule dictates that your PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides. It should last no more than 20 minutes. And it should contain a font that is at least 30 points.

The ten slides should represent the following ten concepts to be covered in your meeting:

1.	The problem
2.	Your solution
3.	Business model
4.	Underlying technology
5.	Sales and marketing
6.	Marketplace competition
7.	Executive Team
8.	Projections and milestones
9.	Status and timeline
10.	Summary and call-to-action

You should cover your ten slides in 20 minutes leaving 40 minutes (hour meeting) for questions and discussion assuming the meeting begins on time. Speaking of the Q&A portion of your presentation, be sure to have compiled a list of FAQ (frequently asked questions) and research and rehearse the answers prior to your pitch.

Regarding the look of your PowerPoint presentation, use colorful graphics and related photographs. And instead of jamming as much information as you can by using a small 10-point font, ease your guest’s experience by enhancing the font to 30 points. The worse pitch possible involves a presenter reading their prepared text. It removes the passion and enthusiasm from the pitch process and it innately tells me that they don’t really know their material well enough.

During the pitch process of ABC’s American Inventor, every time an inventor read from their PowerPoint presentation, they failed to generate the interest of the panel judges and thus were eliminated from the competition.

A PowerPoint show should be used to augment your performance not be the show. -- PC