"There's a Slide For That" - Generic Slides to Avoid in your Pitch

Most VCs have ADHD - they see familiar slide formats and become irritated and impatient. This is also professional disease of many mid-level managers. Several years ago Intel was able to lay off 10000 middle managers to make decision making process shorter.<p>Not once I had investors looking for 1 millisecond on the slide and telling "Next". Only 5% of the stuff is drawn or written on the slide, I can talk several minutes about it, but VC understand everything from the 1st millisecond ;)<p>I like people who can ask questions about the contents of the presentation and not only about it's format.<p>One of the reasons of choosing familiar slide formats (like for example "Competition Quadrant") is that it's familiar, so you can go straight to the content without loosing time to explain the format itself.

tl;dr: please make sure you understand and can speak to each of the slides in your deck, especially these most common ones.<p>Note that this is very different from the takeaway suggested by the title -- avoid these slides. That may be the poster's opinion, but there is no indication in the article that it is that of the article's author.

Those 5 slides have to cover about 90% of slides in 90% of (business) presentations.

So what would a VC think of someone who came in with no deck, and just sketched on a whiteboard or paper pad on an easel? The best talks I've been to have been presented that way, with no technology at all. Of course those have been more academic in nature.

well, all the deck goes to the dev/null.<p>it was crafted reading other advices like this.<p>well... i think i'll do everything reflected/filpped vice versa upside down on the slides. just that a VC could not say 'oh i saw that before 1000 times just with other names'. will catch their attention, make them think, use a system of mirrors just to read!