David Greene's Profile

While it is difficult to suggest from the current numbers that the Coach
bubble is about to burst, Robert Passikoff, CEO of Brand Keys, offers a caution.
"Ubiquity can be the death of a brand. You need to be very careful when you
expand."

But, is Mr. Frankfort pushing ahead too quickly? Will ubiquity or other
factors lead to a devaluation of the Coach brand?

A report on BusinessWeek.com suggests there is a potential for such a
problem at Coach. A close look at the company's sales, the report concludes,
shows retail revenue increases came primarily from Coach's factory outlet stores
that stocked discounted merchandise. Sales at Coach outlets were up 33.4 percent
compared to the 20.8 percent registered by its retail stores.

As I put the book down, I came away with the feeling that I needed to take
something away. I needed to capture the spirit of the book. I knew from past
history that the “Giant Erasers” would soon be wiping away the memories of this
profound work. I took out a pen and wrote down the quotation from page 35 on the
back of a business card.

December 30, 2005








The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint











I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.




However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.




Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.




Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:






1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action







You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.




The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.




The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.




So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

Teradata distinguishes between growth in relational database software used for general purposes and growth pertaining specifically to enterprise data warehousing - its central information platform, marketed globally to Fortune 3,000 companies.

Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer for Teradata, identified trends driving the demand for advanced enterprise data warehousing. "The ability to acquire data in real time and to do event-based decision-making will become mainstream. The storing and analysis of unstructured data in RDBMS products will grow dramatically, given the low cost of disk space. And RDBMS self-management will become even more important than it already is today," Brobst said, adding that, "In the next five years, enterprises will be managing 30 times the data that they are managing today. Because Teradata's database is designed to handle unlimited scalability, the market is coming to us."

Brobst further differentiated Teradata in the context of data warehousing. "Teradata's continued growth is fueled not only by increases in data volume and related demands, but more importantly by the evolving need of companies to integrate and fully exploit that data," Brobst said. "Companies typically turn to Teradata and enterprise data warehousing after previous attempts with other technologies."

In addition to its effectiveness, he underscored the efficiencies that Teradata can deliver. "Teradata consistently proves to be far more cost effective for all facets of data warehousing and enterprise analytics," he said.

Finally, Brobst added that while database software is common and available from many sources, "the design and effective deployment of an enterprise data warehouse in an industry-specific environment, tuned to deliver measurable results and rapid return on investment, is definitely not a commodity."

DC reported key factors accelerating the growth in RDBMS software including:



• The need for better information governance, motivated by compliance issues and resulting in such database-growing initiatives as master data management;
• Higher demand in emerging economies, such as Europe, the Middle East and Africa;
• Declining unit prices for data storage, making it cheaper than in the past to deploy more databases for failover, disaster recovery, reporting and scalability purposes.