Less is more
And some tips for building decks
[substantially-expanded version of LinkedIn post]
“Less is more” — a principle often easier said than done. I myself have come a long way since starting as a junior lawyer who (foolishly) thought “more is more”. 📉
Mark Twain was right when he said: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It takes so much more effort to be concise. 🕰️
This does require a lot of art to avoid over-simplifying, as Albert Einstein recognized: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
I recently spent quite some time with a founder on their pitch deck. I kept reminding them that “Less is more” ✂️, and also explained my own approach as an investor:
Long and verbose content raises concerns 🚩. I will wonder if it’s because the founder didn’t understand the area well enough to know what is important, and/or didn’t bother to invest the effort, and/or didn’t know what good storytelling looked like.
Help the audience 🧠. If I am interested, I’ll be reading and trying to understand the slide while listening to the founder. A simple and concise slide reduces my mental load, improving my comprehension and retention of the messages being conveyed.
Enable effective forwarding 🧐. A VC will forward the deck to others. So the slides must be quickly and easily comprehensible on their own without any clarification or voiceover, yet not so long as to turn readers off.
This is what I used to do when making decks:
Start with a doc. I want to nail my storyline first, and I find that easier in a doc where I can also easily review the entire flow and don’t have to fuss with visual elements.
Identify the 3 key points I want the audience to remember and take away. Over time, I’ve come to believe that 3 is optimal, and any more might be too many. (For an early-stage pitch deck, the 3 key points are usually your compelling answers to “Why this”, “Why us” and “Why now”.)
Create a storyline (in the form of bullet points) to convey the 3 key points. Yes I will include surrounding context, but I will also give these 3 key points extra airtime.
Create the slides based on the bullet points.
Apply the power of subtraction, by ruthlessly and constantly asking: “Would the story be affected if I remove this slide/chart/bullet/sentence/word?” — and delete if not. Removal often improves it.
Importantly, be careful of the common mistake of starting with what you want to (or think you should) say. My mental model is:
What you say/show ➡️ What the audience hears/sees ➡️ What the audience comprehends/remembers
So I suggest starting with what you want the audience to comprehend and remember, and then work backwards to what you say and show to achieve that. 🎯
This approach has served me well. My presentations and decks used to be pretty awful. After I started using this approach, they became barely passable 😉.