Tools New Presentations From creating story and design concepts to developing entire presentation templates and systems, Duarte can make sure your presentation makes the right impact on your audience. Existing Presentations Using the building blocks you already have in place—your content, presentation system, and visual assets—Duarte can enhance, revise, or redesign your existing presentations. Device-Based Presentations Your content must be compelling on all platforms. Multimedia Sometimes your idea is best showcased and shared through multimedia, including motion graphics, videos, and animated demos. Events Duarte has been part of hundreds of company events, doing everything from creating the theme and message strategy to crafting presentations for keynotes and break-out sessions.
Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test? - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 22, 2012 An audience can’t listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? It’s also important to stick to a consistent visual style in your slide deck. Consider the “before” slide below. Instead, streamline the text and incorporate simple visual elements (and save teleprompter text for the “notes” field, which the audience can’t see). Flow. Contrast. White space. Hierarchy. Unity.
How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. So, you have a startup idea. You can see it now. The only problem is that your vision is based on having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of happy users and, currently, you have zero happy users. If your startup plan is directly based on this vision, you will struggle. You need a different plan; a plan that doesn’t assume millions of happy users. You need a first 1,000 users plan. Unfortunately, looking at how successful startups are currently executing (Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare) doesn’t help because their growth plans are based on the fact that they already have millions of users. You have to look at their history. Focus on a Niche. The common theme in all of these recommendations is to not be afraid to do some things that won’t scale past the first 1,000 users or aren’t part of your eventual vision.
3 tips for TED speakers (and other talkers) Failing well Failure sucks. Nobody wants to fail. But in the start-up world, most people are doing just that. I’m not sure I’ve read much about “how” to fail, since failure is so depressing and negative. But I’m here to tell you that there is a good way to fail and that there are steps for positively managing the aftermath. Thank your investors for their faith and confidence in both you and the mission, and express how truly sorry you are that it didn’t work out.Work hard to leave on good terms with all other key constituencies - co-founders, employees, service providers, etc. While it’s poetic to say “do it again,” maybe that’s not necessarily the right thing for everybody to do.
10 Ways to Prepare for a TED-format Talk These 18-minute talks are hard to do. It’s easier to blather on for an hour than talk for a tight 18 minutes knowing that if you go over, you (literally) will get the hook. The talks I give usually take me a comfortable 45 minutes but I needed to get the insights out in 18 minutes. I delivered one talk at TEDxEast and was thrilled to look up at the clock just as it was ticking down with :06 seconds left on the clock. Here are the ten steps I went through in rehearsing for my talks. 1. I trimmed and trimmed and trimmed until I felt like it was close to 18 minutes. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
My 2010 Mentors I was going through my reader this morning and it occurred to me; I learned a lot from a lot of smart people in 2010. There were a number of people I looked to for brilliance, insight and perspective. These people are smart, funny, energetic and definitely worth following and reading in 2011. My mentors of 2010: Rosabeth Moss Kantor – Leadership and Business Fred Wilson – Start-ups and Entreprenuership Paul Dunay – B2B Marketing David Brock -Sales Mark Suster – Sales, Start-Ups, Entreprenuership Seth Godin – Marketing, Personal Development, Leadership Jill Konrath – Sales Steve Chihos – Change, Change Leadership, Organizational Change S. Wally Bock – Leadership Dan Waldo – Passion, Energy, Life Tibor Shanto – Sales Seth Levine – VC, Start-ups TechStars Companies and Founders – Pure Grit, Passion, If there are folks you found super valuable in 2010 share them in the comments.
Secrets From a TED2013 Speaker: Preparing for the "Talk of One's Life" 14 Ways To Be A Great Startup CEO Everyone thinks that being a startup CEO is a glamorous job or one that has to be a ton of fun. That's what I now refer to as the "glamour brain" speaking aka the startup life you hear about from the press. You know the press articles I'm talking about... the ones that talk about how easy it is to raise money, how many users the company is getting, and how great it is to be CEO. Very rarely do you hear about what a bitch it is to be CEO and how it's not for every founder that wants to be an entrepreneur. I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about what it takes to be a great Startup CEO that is also a founder. Be A Keeper Of The Company Vision The CEO is the keeper of the company's overall vision. Absorb The Pain For The Team A startup CEO needs to be the personal voodoo doll for a startup. Find The Smartest People And Defer On Domain Expertise A startup CEO has a great knack for finding talent. Be A Good Link Between The Company + Investors Be Able To Learn On The Job
5 Ways to Help Your Students Become Better Questioners The humble question is an indispensable tool: the spade that helps us dig for truth, or the flashlight that illuminates surrounding darkness. Questioning helps us learn, explore the unknown, and adapt to change. That makes it a most precious “app” today, in a world where everything is changing and so much is unknown. And yet, we don’t seem to value questioning as much as we should. For the most part, in our workplaces as well as our classrooms, it is the answers we reward -- while the questions are barely tolerated. To change that is easier said than done. How to Encourage Questioning 1. Asking a question can be a scary step into the void. 2. This is a tough one. 3. Part of the appeal of “questions-only” exercises is that there’s an element of play involved, as in: Can you turn that answer/statement into a question? 4. 5. If the long-term goal is to create lifelong questioners, then the challenge is to make questioning a habit -- a part of the way one thinks.