Last week I scribled some thoughts on presentation slides, and got some very good comments. Thanks!
One comment referred to Guy Kawasaki and something he wrote blogged last year: The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint:

a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

He also writes:

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.

I’m not a venture capitalist, but I can easily see that that’s the truth (plus I like it when people actually say something is “crap” when it is ;-). However, I do wonder about these startups spending time on patents and venture capital. It’s overhead. Definitely not their core business, they’re diverting resources from actually getting to market and truly exploiting the “first mover advantage”.

Contrarily, Greg Gianforte of RightNow Technologies did it all without VC, and he’s doing just fine. He wrote a book about how he (and others) did it: Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.
I think there are good lessons there, particularly for Web 2.0 and OpenSource-based companies (either developing or using): “Be smart and fast, instead of drooling over VC” (my words ;-).

Some of the companies out there have really interesting ideas, but absolutely no business model. Somehow they got VC anyway…. I don’t know if I should respect that accomplishment, or consider whether VCs are perhaps heading towards a bust again. In the best case, the VCs are betting on a lot of different things, knowing that only some will survive and pay off. So, congrats to you, startup! You are now actually someone’s lottery ticket! How’s your business going?