Guy's PowerPoint 10/20/30 rule

Guy Kawasaki has seen too many pitches. It's making him sick (or so he says) listening to so many bad PowerPoint presentations. A while back he finally did something about it and published his thoughts on a good VC pitch.

It occurred to me these made a great set of rules for all sorts of pitches, including product pitches, so I've boiled his thoughts down to their essence here.

A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

That's it. He has more detail on his blog about what 10 slides you want for a VC pitch (and many should apply to a good product pitch), but the essence is, as Mies van der Rohe said, less is more. If you need more slides, time or words to explain your idea, you probably haven't thought it through well enough yet.

Comments

[Robert Brazile]

Hmm. Probably a nice rule of thumb for a that sort of thing, but seems to address the symptoms rather than the causes of bad PowerPoint-based presentations -- which he at least touches on when he points out that too many words is perhaps an indicator that the presenter doesn't know his or her material well enough.

In my experience I have found that presentations suffer mostly when the presenter has given insufficient thought to the story he or she is trying to tell. The result is often a lack of structure and/or the lack of an obvious point. Then you get meandering and info-dumps and all manner of extraneous stuff.

There are presentation style issues, such as using words when pictures would be best, or using pictures when words would be best, or using too many of either when it's you that the audience should be paying attention to. But getting the story right can mean a successful presentation in spite of stylistic mistakes.