Archives for March 2008

Zen, Presentations, and VCs

March 28, 2008 1 Comment

One of my personal pet peeves is bad presentation skill. Considering the technology industry is so focused on information and knowledge, it’s amazing how bad we are at communicating it. I see this almost on a daily basis in Sales. It’s either an over loaded presentation on technology from marketing, a badly organized presentation from Sales people, or — worst of all — a presentation that is just a printed record of what the presenter said. Blah!

So I was giddy with excitement (honestly, just ask my wife…she was there) when I came across a wonderful book by Garr Reynolds called presentation zen. I have relying on this book lately as I develop a couple of presentations, specifically funding presentations where it is most important to be able to tell a story about what your working on and why it’s the most important thing since sliced bread (at least to your potential customers). That is one of the key points that presentation zen makes: your presentation should be telling a story, and it shouldn’t be a novel…think more picture story book. (for a great example, see Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on How creativity is being strangled by the law.)

The best part of presentation zen is that it can be used as a quick reference guide as your working on a presentation. It helps to reinforce the lessons you know. Such as start planning your presentation without your computer. You need to know your story line and flow, and having the computer in front of you when you do this only distracts you into things that don’t matter (like large bullet lists). I forgot this lesson when I started working on my latest presentation and the book, along with some peers with whom I reviewed an early draft, reminded me of my errors.

If you do presentations, do your audience (and yourself) a favor and buy a copy of this book!

I would also check out a Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, he brings up a great set of points on creating a presentation as well as a wonderful template to start with if your building a funding presentation (and he happens to have written the forward to presentation zen). A huge thanks goes out to Val for pointing me to this posting!

Since I’m on the topic of funding, if you interested in the world venture capital, I recently came across an interesting opinion piece on the Software VC Outlook for 2008.

More Than a Quote a Business Philosophy

March 28, 2008 Leave a Comment

“I’m happy about the fact that I’ve retired more people than I’ve fired.”

That quote is from a friend of mine and wins my Business Philosophy of the Year award. In a period of time when you hear stories in the news about how the rich keep getting richer, you see wall street firms imploding under their own house of cards that they built, and you hear stories from friend after friend of how mis-managed the companies that they work for are that hearing someone who is building a business make a statement like that is down right impressive. (Even more so when you know them well enough that it comes from the person’s heart and they mean it.)

I guess it’s the fact that true sentiment like that is so hard to find when you work in the get rich quick world of high technology and vulture capitalists that I felt it was worth sharing…

Green Scene Hits Your Code

March 20, 2008 2 Comments

Since my mind is on efficiency this morning (see previous post about Facebook) I wanted to share an interesting blog posting I’ve had open in a browser for a few weeks now. Steve Sounders, web performance guru from Google and previously Yahoo, posted some interesting thoughts on how green is your web page?

Steve did a quick mental experiment of calculating the CO2 emissions caused by bad code on a large website, he used wikipedia as his example. I find this a bit interesting on the cyclical nature of the topic. I might be showing my age a bit here, but back when I was a lad learning how to code up on the frozen tundra, we actually took into consideration efficiency and the cost of operations (maybe it was our proximity to Cray Research that drove this…). I find it interesting that the green movement is causing this topic to be thought of again but in a different way.

I have been doing a little fun project like this myself at home. A friend loaned my a device called Kill A Watz, which you plug into a power outlet and then plug other electrical devices into the Kill A Watz. The Kill A Watz then measurs how much electicity you are using on that one outlet. It can track over time and give you the KW over a time period as well as real time watt usage. I am using this on our home entertainment center to measure how much electricity is uses when it’s in standby mode. Watch for a posting on that next week. (I will give a teaser and let you know that a flat panel plasma TV uses twice the electricity when displaying a bright scene than when displaying a dark one…)