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Zen, Presentations, and VCs

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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

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“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…

Starbucks Coup Times Two

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I recently become aware of two great coup happening in Starbuck’s land. Both of which will have a ripple effect through the business community…but probably not how you think.

The first one being some inside information from my local Starbucks manager I heard this week. Starbucks will be discontinuing their breakfast sandwiches starting this fall. I think this is a huge mistake on their part and I bet is being made by some recently hired corporate executive from the fast food chain industry. Sit in a Starbucks on any morning and see how many people order those sandwiches. How many of them are business people or regulars who probably double their spending at Starbucks because of that sandwich? A lot (I have done this field research).

I only go to Starbucks now because of those sandwiches (personally, I lost the taste for Starbucks coffee after an extended trip to Italy two years ago). The reason is rooted in the fact that now that McDonalds is serving premium coffee they don’t want to be seen as competing with them. I find this thinking ridiculous; unless those sandwiches are adding less to their bottom line than my back of the napkin field calculations have come up with, this decision will hurt Starbucks more than it will help them.

The second one I read about this morning, Starbucks Switches to Free AT&T Wifi , or will be starting this spring. As all road warriors will know, Starbucks is the go to location for getting on line while on the road. There have been times that I have spent more time at starbucks in a day that I did at my hotel. As they break away form their 6 year relationship with T-Mobile, this changes will have multiple economic ripple effects:

  1. T-Mobile will be taking a huge hit to their bottom line. The majority of their 8900 wifi locations in the US were at Starbucks’ 6800 company operated stored (from Starbucks PDF Fact Sheet). T-Mobile’s wifi business will just about starve if they don’t strike a deal with some other retail outlet. Not to mention that most T-Mobile customers I know that have a T-Mobile phone have it primarily for the discount on the wifi access, which they use mostly at Starbucks.
  2. AT&T will gets a huge boost to their Wifi business (their bottom line is so large, I’m not sure how much of an immediate impact this will have.). With costs much lower for the service than T-Mobile, and Starbucks debit card holders getting 2 hours of free access per day, and with all 100,000 US Starbucks employees getting free wifi access, and with the service eventually being expanded to AT&T wireless customers, let’s hope that the AT&T infrastructure is able to handle this better than it has been handeling their Uverse roll out (which isn’t going smoothly, I hear).
  3. Starbucks should see a boost to their debit card transactions since holders of those cards get free wifi. This has trickle through to the credit card companies as they process the transactions for these cards, and of course take a percentage fee. (I believe Visa is the processor behind these cards, so this boost in revenue will help with their upcoming IPO).

It’s amazing how interconnected the business decisions at this scale can become.  One just has to be able to look past the headline and connect the dots.