Upand$tarting

Anyone who knows more than one successful Start-Up founder knows there are a few skills that, almost without exception, they share.  Contagious enthusiasm, motivation and drive, and natural presentation skills are all necessary skills needed to succeed.

Have you ever seen a Start-Up founder present his vision?  Whether to a potential investor, advisor or job candidate?  It can be amazing and inspiring, a mark of a truly successful Entrepreneur.  How do you get good at presenting info?  I’ve pulled together a few ideas and links to help get you started.

Great Visuals

The best thing your slides can do for you is stay out of the way and emphasize your talking points.  More than anything – poor quality and content of your slides will leave the be remembered that way; high quality slides will cause people to remember your talk.

I’m a huge fan of Edward Tufte and of both his books and seminars.  If you haven’t read him before, you owe it to yourself to purchase his Essay, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint on his site.  I’ve been to his seminars twice and have all his books, my favorite part of his talk is when he describes the Overhead Projector Striptease.  Where your professor would put a blank piece of paper over his “slide” to keep his bored audience from reading ahead.

At the very least, visit his site and explore the message boards – they are fascinating.

Presentation Design

Just because you can add a screeching tire sound effect to your slides in Powerpoint doesn’t mean you should.  Ditto for using a bright yellow background.  There are some basic design do’s and don’ts.  Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen (the book and blog), is a great source for high quality design tips.

Pulling it all Together

TED is one of my favorite things on the internet, amazingly smart people giving amazingly effective presentations.  They’re mission statement is “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”.  Chris Anderson, TED’s CEO, has given us a gift by allowing us to view all of these presentations.  He recently blogged about what he thinks it takes to present like a TEDster.

What’s Chris’ biggest piece of advice?  Preparation is key, Maintain clarity in your presentation and bring something of yourself (your unique style) to your talk.

What’s the worst thing you can do? Have a presentation full of bullet point slides and read from them verbatim.