The economic empowerment of women is the subject of my interview with Terry Neese, co-founder of the so-named institute based in Oklahoma City.

A Distinguished Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, Terry was visiting southern California recently to speak at the Orange County Institute for Women Entrepreneurs.

Listen as Terry describes her worldwide efforts to empower women entrepreneurs.

Show #184 (48:49)
Tags: Irvine Mayor Beth Krom, Golden Seeds founder Stephanie Hanbury-Brown

Thursday October 2nd at 6pm: the San Diego Tech Coast Angels present the 2nd Annual Quick Pitch Competition. Register immediately!

Let's face it: your PowerPoints are boring!

You over-sell. You cram too much on each slide; I know what you think: "if only I could use a smaller font, I could show so much more..."

And those fancy diagrams? When I see one I stop listening and think, "Is he going to torture all of us by explaining that whole thing?"

Instead get Garr Reynolds' book, PresentationZen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery; with a forward by Guy Kawasaki, you know it's gonna be great!

Tech Coast Angels has spent the past several months evaluating a conversion from our legacy system to Angelsoft. Here's my take on how things stack up:

11. Keeping it new: Will TCA support Chrome and other new browsers? Or new email applications as they come out? Have we even thought of new IP security improvements for spam? All of this will cost money. We get all of this as part of Angelsoft.

10. David Rose: He founded the New York Angels; he founded Angelsoft. This summer he opened SparkSpace a 15,000 sq ft incubator in NYC.

9. Entrepreneur benefits: A single funding application can be directed to multiple angel groups. Today an entrepreneur must make separate application to TCA and the Pasadena Angels. Tomorrow they'll make one application and send it to multiple groups.

8. The VC connection: Angelsoft has 45 VC's on board already and growing each day. Does TCA want to be on a shared back-end with all the VC's in the US? For referring deals up and down? Maybe not, but all 400 other groups will have a quicker and simpler connection to these VC's (as well as other groups). TCA will be left behind if not on Angelsoft.

7. Is angel investing evolving, changing right before our eyes? The upset of the US economy is having an effect, but will the nature of angel investing change in other ways we can't even imagine today? Very likely and Angelsoft will be a catalyst for this change.

6. Multimedia: This past week I have been capturing video pitches of TCA deals that have signed term sheets and are ready to close. A video pitch offers an opportunity for us to share the deal with other angels around the country and around the world. Every one of the 3 deals participating in this week's video shoot is uploading their video pitch to Angelsoft's OPENdeals. I tried to upload the same video to the TCA site; it failed, "file size exceeds limits".

5. The Wisdom of Crowds: This same world-wide community of users will generate more suggestions for improving Angelsoft than any one group would ever dream of. Just this month, Angelsoft released a new version with over 500 new features and improvements, all for free and available to all their angel groups. The TCA website has been tailored to our needs for the past few years, but its capabilities will never keep up with the capabilities of Angelsoft.

4. Syndication: We join a world-wide community of angel investors and VCs. Angelsoft has over 400 angel groups using their system and a growing number of VCs. Opportunities to syndicate deals among these many groups becomes as easy clicking the mouse to make an administrator in Las Vegas, Pasadena, or Boston aware of an exciting deal here at TCA that's looking to top-off its round.

3. One less volunteer: Today we must solicit the services of a tech savvy member to oversee the TCA website and coordinate with part-time programmers who moonlight on our projects. All the hassles of making and restoring backups, keeping the system up and fully functional will be Angesloft's job.

2. It's Free: Angelsoft has guaranteed we can use their system for free.

1. Costs: We will cut our expenses related to maintaining our own website. True, we'll still have our own website, but all mission critical systems will be on Angelsoft. Our present system will shrink to 10% of its current size. And we're talking real money; just a year ago we spent $45,000 to upgrade our website.

Do our neighbors to the north know how to get their money out of a deal better than we do here in the US?

Let's compare: what's the state of angel investing in Canada compared to the US? Oh, you think you know?

Canadian angels invest twice what Canadian VCs do in early stage deals, whereas, according to the National Angel Organization President Dan Mothersill, in the US the numbers are close to equal. Canadian VCs have abandoned seed, early stage and even A rounds. So since angels are doing the $1, $2, $3, $6 and even $11 million deals, they've got to partner.

Are Canadian angels enjoying better exit opportunities than their US peers? According to Dan they are.

Show #180 (49:12)

So much content! A busy week!
Video pitches, an executive summary critique and more... download and watch.

Show 179 (05:13)

Want to have your funding application seen by twice as many investors? Create a video pitch to accompany your application then post it to Angelsoft's OPENdeals.

"OPENdeals submissions have grown 140% over the past couple of months," says Angelsoft COO Ryan Janssen. But first, Ryan's trying to re-brand the concept; OPENdeals, the name has implications he doesn't like, but "Investor Community"? That's a catchy phrase! Rolls right off the tongue! I suggest he keep looking for the right phrase.

But whatever he calls it, entrepreneurs and their deal leads are looking beyond their local borders; they're looking to top-off the round and OPENdeals gives them a way to share the deal around the world.

With all these video pitches that are coming, will Angelsoft become the YouTube of angel investing? They're working with an angel-backed startup, Viddler, to host the video pitches.

Are we witnessing the evolution of angel investing? Ryan makes his case...

Show #178 (17:14)

Kunal Shah sent his Executive Summary to me. His first problem: he included the 20 Most-Asked Questions with Answers; I stapled it all together and without a closer look, I thought it was a 7-page summary. After I calmed down I penned my, now infamous, treatise on Executive Summaries. This post got more comments than anything I've done in years, so it hit a nerve. Now I had to pay it back to Kunal...

I asked him if I could critique his Summary and post it to the blog; he said ok, so long as I didn't go crazy! You be the judge.

Download Kunal's 24x7 Security Executive Summary and follow along with the video critique.

Show #177 (17:17)

I get all kinds of email, but when Rick Holdren chimed in with, "we've done 5 investments in 2008, one in Israel, the other Baltic, one Chile, Montreal, and Peru; the US doesn't have all the top scientists in the world. I get a kick out of 'we don't invest in anything more than 2 hours from us'", I smelled a story!

So here's Rick Holdren of the Healthcare Angels from Hurricane Ike battered Houston, on his birthday.

(54:20)

After I worked all weekend playing with Screenflow, today it was showtime!

The setup was simple; the real work came as each of my entrepreneur guinea pigs trimmed their PowerPoint decks. The big take-away: these video pitches have to be shorter than the 15-minute time slot they often get in front of a live audience; where a live presentation might keep investors riveted this is a different medium and viewers will click away.

Take a look at these video pitches and gimme some feedback:
MojoPages and Aweli.

Problems, I had a few. Screenflow works smoothly, but to keep the file size reasonably small during the export, scale the file down to 25%. I knew Soundsoap's noise reduction tool was a must, but at first I was having file bloat issues until I used the MPEG-4 codec. If you're going to try this, help yourself to my checklists for tech-prep and subject-prep.

What were all three of these entrepreneurs planning to do with their video pitches? Post them to Angelsoft's OPENdeals.

Guidelines for video pitches (Download the PDF )
Guy Kawasaki has his guidelines for the perfect PowerPoint slide deck, but too few entrepreneurs follow his suggestions. And think how important these slides are; you use them when you're in front of, usually a roomful of, potential investors. Take into account the crappy national economy and assume that some investors, maybe more than a few, might be thinking that, compared to your deal, real estate might be a better asset to hold if they can time it right. Without getting too morose, it's a difficult time for a startup to get funded. It's always taken massive doses of persistence; now it's taking more.

For the past 10 years I've sat through many PowerPoint presentations. What a pity so few really get it right.

You know your technology, you've studied the market and you've squeezed every nickel yet when you get that opportunity to pitch, to the people who could help you realize your dreams, you go at it half-assed. You fail to inspire us, maybe even worse, you bore us, all because you didn't do your homework. We enjoy seeing a good presentation. We want to get involved with exciting new concepts with starry-eyed entrepreneurs. Make us happy; work on those slides!

First off, you're gonna have different presentations for different audiences. One size does not fit all. Let's focus on one to go with your video pitch. "Why can't I use one of the slide decks I already have?" You can, but you won't get the impact you're hoping for and it's not going to take long to tailor your slides perfectly for video.

Prepping for the shoot
I'm experimenting with recording entrepreneurs and their presentations; the other day I spent all day playing with 4 different presentations for a video shoot set for next week. The entrepreneurs will walk away with a movie on DVD that combines a video of them giving their pitch in a small window right next to their PowerPoint slides - and it's all perfectly synched, so when the presenter says, "on this next slide, The Team", that slide advances in perfect synch.

Investors love these videos; even though they're travelling, pitch videos allow them to stay involved, to participate in the next hot deal. The benefits to you, the entrepreneur, are many; you'll attract more interest and it can happen virally - without driving all over southern California in my case. You'll pick up interest from out of town investors, maybe even across the country.

Angel investing is changing. Tools like Angelsoft allow investors to syndicate more easily than ever before. The old mantra, "angels only invest within a two hour driving radius" is slowly breaking down. If you put together an effective video slide deck and present it with passion, you'll be taking a giant step in getting your startup funded.

Making it
Let's consider some of the challenges that video pitching puts on your slides...

1. Visibility. The slides will be shown in a video display, not projected on to a 100" screen, so you've got to:

a. Simplify the content, and
b. Maximize the contrast.

Try it right now. Instead of running SlideShow full screen, constrain the presentation to a window that only takes up 55% of the laptop display. Now shrink it again to the 720x420 video display and imagine 40% of this screen dedicated to the video of you pitching. Get the picture? Those slides with loads of text will be even harder to read. Unless you optimize your slides for this reduced display, the presentation will lose its punch. As Guy Kawasaki recommends, use a big font, 32pt is nice, and limit what you write on each slide.

Coincidence? Two of these four presentations at hand are using blue text to make their points. I'm sure it looks great blown up on a wall, but in this tiny world of a YouTube window it blows. You say you must have blue text? Make it navy blue/black and keep the background pale for the best high contrast look.

2. Tables. Yikes! I advance to an important slide, the financial projections and there's too much detail. Nooneisgonnabeabletomakeanysenseofthis. So thin those tables down. Don't show the grid outline, that's just more distraction. Show your five year projections with only a few rows of data.

3. Attention span. Last year I was posting 10 minute videos on my blog. Then I went to a podcast conference and learned that the average time someone will stay looking at a video is only 3.5 minutes! And that's for interesting clips of cats up a tree, not talking heads pitching get rich quick schemes. If you present at Tech Coast Angels we give you 15 minutes, but that's live; that much time gives us plenty of opportunities to jiggle our Blackberries; same on the web, it's easy to click away to something else. I offer two thoughts:

a. Shorten the presentation; yes you can tell your story in less time, and
b. Place your logo on each slide, like TV stations do with their programming.

One of the 4 slide decks for next week's shoot is missing this logo-on-every-slide, so when I got distracted for a moment then returned to the presentation (I was pretending to be the entrepreneur making the video pitch) I couldn't remember the company name! If it happened to me it'll happen to others, so place that cute little icon on every slide.

4. Beginning and Ending slides. I hate Summary slides, but don't let me get ahead of myself. Your title slide, let's take a fresh look. This slide will sit in the video display for several seconds while you chatter your introduction and before that, during the time it takes for the viewer to press PLAY. Keep it very simple. And no summary slides to start with either; that's really pouring cold water on the fire you're trying to light. Title slide: logo big, your name smaller. Drop the URLs, the somber looking "Confidential" (this is headed for a large audience) and the titles, addresses or phone numbers you've scribbled all over this slide.

5. A big finish. One of these slide decks I've been playing with ends suddenly, kaput! So the video ends with PowerPoint's bleak finale: "End of slide show, click to exit".

Come on, this is Tinsel town; now's when the credits roll!

Let's land on a "final" slide that is identical to the first slide, that title slide. That's a clue for you to stop talking, to wrap up. You might be on such a roll that you click right past the slide you usually end on, so wind it up as your logo glows on the screen.

But we're not done. Create one or two slides with just your URL (and a small logo) then a slide with just your contact phone number (logo, too). Can you picture this? These last few slides will be like the credits rolling at the end of a flick.

Now you're making an effective video presentation; something designed specifically for the medium.

Next, publish it everywhere: to Angelsoft's OPENdeals, your Facebook page, YouTube and your own website, too.

The tools
Credit goes to Ken Deemer, a Tech Coast Angel in LA; he found the $99 Screenflow for the Mac; it makes all this video stuff click. (I run my MacBook Pro with Boot Camp so it can run Vista, too; the best of both worlds.) Add Office with PowerPoint for another $150. You could be done with just these two, but I add a LED light, a Litepanels 1x1 Flood for $1,700, and an external microphone, like the $200 Audio Technica 3035 condenser mic connected to a MOTU UltraLite firewire mixer, $550. Lastly, add a pop filter for that studio look.

Camera? That built in iSight camera on the Mac works great.

This configuration is compact! You can wheel it into any conference room and not have to sweat the setup.

You're trying to complete a film; you need help. You need Boolaka. Three words describe the company: create, collaborate and complete. Boolaka itself is a made for TV movie. Two high tech salespeople decide to build a site to revolutionize Hollywood. But do they have the insights to create the tools this market needs? How do they get people in the business to return their phone calls? And what about a revenue plan? Their primary revenue source is advertising.

Listen closely. Founders Tom Anderson in Beverly Hills and Mark Mansfield in NYC are looking for feedback. Yes, they have the geography covered, but where are the holes in their strategy?

What strengths can they capitalize on?
What advice would you offer?
And what the heck is a Boolaka?

Show #172 (43:44)

Last time I looked I couldn't find a good cheat sheet on writing an effective executive summary (ES). I guess that means I must write one. I certainly get enough ES's and many times I enjoy offering a critique; many ES's need a critique, so put away your ego and get ready for some feedback.

Of course, I don't love ES's; it's just me being smart-alecky. But I hate business plans even more; no one reads business plans. Why? Because there's no time; I'm not that interested at that point of first contact, and I'm not alone. I don't know anyone who wants to see your business plan. That's why the heavy lifting falls to the ES.

Knowing that we (who's the we? me and my angel peers) are too busy for a long business plan, the ES plays the critical role of sparking our interest.

Here are a few of my Do's and Don'ts

1. It can only be 2 pages. This is a great discipline for you; tell your story succinctly and cover all the essentials in just a front 'n back handout. Why only 2-pages? I already told you! We are constantly looking at applicants' entreaties for funding. We want to see something that either fits our interests or doesn't, and we can tell in just 2 pages.

2. Don't fall into the trap that so many entrepreneurs do: "if the investor only knew everything about this opportunity they'd fall in love with the concept like I have".

False! You will bore us. We'll squirm. If it's a 7 page ES we won't even begin to look. Trust me. Many entrepreneurs make this mistake during their PowerPoint presentations, too. Instead, leave us begging for more; keep the presentation and the ES short, pique our interest and we'll respond with a question. Then you're effectively working the process.

3. Don't use a cover page. Yes, that is a cute logo and wow, it does look so much more professional; I'll bet you wish there was a way it could be bound with a beautiful plastic binder, too. But follow Rule #1, a cover sheet has all your contact info, true, but it bloats the ES out of the 2-page rule. As we say, "this is business, don't be cute", lose the cover page.

4. So... no cover page, eh? That's where you have your contact info and that big legalese confidentiality notice. What's an entrepreneur to do? Create a footer and instead of placing "Confidential" on every page, enter your contact info, including a phone number. It's almost comical; can you guess how many entrepreneurs send an ES without a phone number? And it's always the ones I want to call! And about that confidentiality language... don't bother. None of us sign non-disclosure agreements; we just see too many deals to be bound by your concerns about trust; get over it! If you really do have some secret sauce, keep it to yourself for now; we can agree on a NDA if we go into due diligence, but you're stuck on the first step, getting looked at, so now that you know that none of us are in business to steal entrepreneurs' ideas, leave the NDA and confidentiality language off the ES.

5. What's the goal? The ES is a great way to generate buzz. If I see an ES that I like, then offer some suggestions for edits and get a nicely finished document, then I can pass it around to my pals and generate more interest. Think of how this other half lives; I can entice a fellow angel investor by saying, "Would you like to see a deal I've been working on? The entrepreneur is coachable (because he incorporated my critiques) and no one else has seen it yet. Now you have them right where you want them, begging to learn more. My angel buddies have done this to me. All of us are flattered to be handed something one of our peers thinks is an interesting deal. If you gain serious interest soon everyone will know, but for the short term it's a sneak peek for the insiders.

6. We don't read executive summaries, either. I told you we don't read business plans and after these first diatribes I'll bet you thought we'd actually read your ES. Sorry, we're too busy and easily distracted.

Hold it! Don't give up! Instead of reading, what we really want to do is 'eyeball' or 'inhale' your ES. What's that? I want to be able to scan the 2 pages and see the most important issues jump off the page. If I see something interesting maybe I'll read a surrounding sentence or two. How do you accomplish this? Use bullets.

Right now I'm looking at an ES, one I haven't looked at before; it's a quiet time during the summer months so I have the time, but jees! Look at these block paragraphs! She expects me to actually read this? Give me lots of eye candy: bullets, graphics and my favorite, a 2-column layout. Instead I have 8 pages, including cover sheet, with solid edge-to-edge block paragraphs. Think like Wired Magazine! Go get a copy. See how they spice up every page; your eyes eagerly devouring the content on each page. Take a page from their playbook! Describe your markets and use bullets to enumerate them. Add a small graph to show revenue growth over 5 years. Take a moment to create a 2-column document, one skinny, the other wide; put all your contact info, all your one-liners about markets, revenue and the raise in the skinny column. Dump everything else into the wide column. Give me a document where I can see that some thought went into the presentation; a document that an investor can easily eyeball, inhaling all the key points. That's your objective. Get to work.

7. Get right to the point. Avoid the mistake of creating context; I don't need you to tell me how your opportunity fits into the history of the personal computer age. Tell me what this company is all about, quickly!

8. Cover all the bases. What are you doing? What's the product or service? How will you market the product? Got competitors? How do you compare? Create paragraph headings; it's another form of eye candy, to delineate these topics.

9. No ransom notes! Page layout gurus often mix fonts, but very carefully! Use Arial or Helvetica for paragraph headings and Times Roman for the body text (the human eye likes serif fonts, they're easier to read). But don't overdo the fonts, use no more than two.
a. Avoid italics (harder to read),
b. Keep it high contrast. Avoid blue text (blue makes a great background color, look at the sky). Try gray, no one uses gray text.
c. Don't justify your paragraphs; ragged right edges are easier to read.
d. Place your logo on each page, just a little icon so I don't forget who you are.

10. Who are you? What's the most important part of your ES? It's often titled: "The Team". Trust is critical to funding at any stage, but especially early stage. Are you a serial entrepreneur? Did you have a paper route as a kid? Is this your 4th startup? We want to know this. And avoid that resume hype, crap like "Harry had overall responsibility for total division business development and during his tenure grew the company's sales 10 fold." Remember, you only have 2 pages and we're eyeballing this thing. Name, position, company name; that's all the room you've got. And that's all you need, because, think about it, what are we looking for? A name or a company name that rings a bell, so lose the resume language and just give us the essential facts.

11. Your board. Got an advisory board? We're often impressed if you do, especially if it's loaded with titans of industry and academia. A board of advisers doesn't cost much either, people who believe in you and your company may sign on with an idea that as you grow they may move onto the board of directors, which will cost you. So start asking. Build up that advisory board. You've got the time and it will go a long way to establishing credibility with your investors.

12. Financial projections. One over-arching theme to this outline is: show investors what we want and expect to see; like you know what you're doing. We see tables when it comes to financial projections, not paragraphs; graphs are cute, but this is business. And we like to see 5 year projections. Revenue, units sold, cost of goods, show us a few lines of detail, but keep it simple. Avoid showing us projections with 70, 80 or 90% gross margins! You think we'll start drooling, right? Wrong! We see entrepreneur naivete. With margins like that you obviously have no idea what it costs to run a successful business!

13. The raise. Ask for the money. I can't read your mind. And raise the right amount. Like Goldilocks, not too much or too little. You can't accomplish much with $150k; we know this. You'll go through the money and be back for more, but then the question will be, "what did you accomplish with the first raise?" Not much, because it wasn't enough. On the other hand, if you're asking for $6M then you're wasting my time, I'm an angel investor and our sweet spot is $1, $2 or maybe $3M; go to a Silicon Valley VC if you really need that much. My standard reply to the entrepreneur who asks for $5M: "what would you do with $1M?" They often think that might be a good start. Know your audience, don't go to Silicon Valley VCs asking for $750k; they have to put $3-5M to work at a time.

14. The Pre-Money number. Not every ES has a pre-money valuation. If you've been working with angels or sophisticated investors then by all means, state your pre-money valuation, but if you haven't had a constructive discussion with a potential investor on this subject then don't. Leave it for a follow-up meeting where there will be some give and take. Many, many entrepreneurs overstate their valuation; it's a hot button and a huge turn-off for investors, so please, keep your delusions of a $23M pre-money valuation to yourself, for now.

15. Expect feedback and incorporate suggestions. If you blow me off at this stage I'll wonder how nice it would feel after I fund you. Each audience is different; when you're dealing with angels incorporate their advice into your ES.

When I get an ES I like I pass it around; it's a great way to get your company introduced to angel investors.

Good luck and get to work.