They probably won't publish this, so I'll put it here:


-----

To the Editors:

The premise of your special on growth in the 15 October 2008 issue is just plain wrong, and the wrongness starts in your lead editorial. http://tinyurl.com/4evh5e

You state that "we live on a planet with finite resources." But we also live in a solar system with eight planets, fifty moons, a million asteroids, a billion comets, and a thermonuclear generator we call the Sun.*

Starting with near-term goals like beaming limitless clean solar power to Earth, and continuing on to longer-term goals such as mining the asteroids, all the resources we need to create wealth for every one of the seven billion people on Earth are right above our heads. Free for the taking.

It doesn't take new technology; those problems were solved forty years ago. It takes leadership and nerve. Both of which appear to be lacking in the Western democracies. Luckily for mankind, other nations on Earth will reject your "no growth" prescription and will develop the untold riches of the solar system. It's a shame that the working language of space will not be English.**

-----

* Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle.

** Hat tip to Robert Heinlein.

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A while back, I posted the code for my "random quote of the day" widget for Blogger/Blogspot. Now I've tweaked it a bit to make it into a Web app for the iPhone (or iPod Touch). If you're reading this from your iPhone, try it now at http://tinyurl.com/ipquote!

It still pulls from the same online database. But now you'll get a single randomized quote, displayed in large print, with at least the top part of the Mobile Safari chrome hidden. (I experimented with hiding all of it, but didn't like the results.) Touch the top bar (the part with the standard "Reload" icon) to get another quote. Repeat until satiated.



Assuming you're running the current iPhone OS, press the "+" sign at the bottom of the screen, then choose "Add to Home Screen" to save the app with a nice custom button.

Obviously, it's free. Enjoy!

(Thanks to SoftFacade for the underlying icon artwork.)

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As a reminder, the second running of the Startup Gauntlet is this Wednesday, October 29th, at 5:30 pm. We're going to be in the 2nd floor ATDC Connections Room this time.

Read my previous post about it here. The first running was great fun, and attracted nearly a dozen entrepreneurs. We're expecting more this week. Sign up now!

Remember, you have to be ready to pitch to get in the door. No observers. Each monthly winner from October through January gets a slot to pitch at StartupRiot in February. And the September through November winners get to compete in December for a TAG Top 40 slot!

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So, like 450 other people, I attended VentureAtlanta last week. For a first-time event, I was impressed. Things were well-organized, they ran on time, and a lot of out-of-town VC friends showed up with checkbooks.

Wednesday was great, with investor-focused events featuring ATDC and VentureLab companies. Then there were two major presentations on Thursday by Carlos Dominguez (Cisco) and by Bernie Marcus, plus a panel discussion -- but the main attractions were the presentations by 21 Atlanta startup companies. And, boy, they stunk.

Alright, I'm going to be rude here... which is why this post is here instead of my other blog.

First off, everyone was alloted six minutes, and that's too long. At an event like this, you want to give people a taste of why your company is special, not the whole meal. Three minute pitches are enough to accomplish that (see Startup Riot). Shrink the slots, and you can either fit in more deals, or you can allow more networking time (which was scarce on Thursday).

Second, the selection criteria weren't obvious. New companies? Nope, Vocalocity and MDdatacor have been around forever. Need money? Nope, MFG.com was explicit about "having all the money they need." I'm still not sure how these 21 companies got on stage and 100 others got left behind.

Those two issues can be laid at the feet of the organizers. To their credit, it was the first time around for this event, and I suspect they'll improve for 2009. But then you get to the quality of the presentations themselves, and there's no one to blame for that except the presenting CEOs.

Look, people, it's supposed to be difficult to organize a coherent and compelling story that you can tell in six (or three!) minutes. That's why they pay you the big bucks. (Or the big equity, if the company doesn't have any bucks yet.) I understand that. There are lots of resources out there to help you, ranging from free to cheap to very pricey consultants.

(In my classes, I tell entrepreneurs to buy and absorb all the books by Edward Tufte, and Guy Kawasaki, and then to scrape everything then can out of Presentation Zen. Those are my basics; there are plenty more.)

But once you've organized your story, putting it up on the wall should be a simple mechanical process. PowerPoint is a blunt instrument, and should be used appropriately. Almost none of the CXOs presenting last Thursday got this part right.

Typeface

Part of it is the typeface rule: 30-point minimum, dammit! I emphasize this over and over again in my classes, but Thursday is an example of why I emphasize it. Look at this sample from Snapfinger:



I don't want to pick on Snapfinger—they did a decent job of explaining an interesting idea, and I wish them a lot of luck. But this photo gives an idea of why I talk about 30-point minimum fonts. From my seat, about halfway back in the ballroom, the only thing big enough to read clearly on that slide is the title. (I know, I know, it's a lousy cellphone snapshot. But it gets my point across. If you can't read your text in a lousy cellphone snapshot, your text is too small.)

Maybe 22-year-old founders can read it just fine. News flash: the check-writing angels and VCs in your audience are twice your age. Maybe three times. Our eyes aren't as good as yours. Adjust.

It may be alright to cram lots of information onto a printed slide that you're going to slide across the table to one or two people. (Actually, I have issues with that strategy also, but that's off-topic for this post.) It's absolutely unacceptable in a hotel ballroom with hundreds of people when you're competing for attention with their Blackberries, iPhones, and laptops. They'll glance up, see an illegible slide, and look back down to their email. You've lost them.

So, out of 21 presenters—including some very well-financed companies that have been around for years— none of them had large enough type throughout their presentation. One was only an occasional offender, and three at least seemed to try. The remainder ranged from marginal to bad to absolutely atrocious.

Better to have no slides than bad slides. And, indeed, challenging CEOs to give a presentation with zero slides would be a good test of how well they can capture and maintain attention without PowerPoint crutches. I doubt that the organizers will try this for VentureAtlanta 2009, but I wish they would!

Artistic License

Then you had the artsy syndrome... where companies had obviously paid expensive graphics artists a lot of money to draw pretty slides. Which were useless.

Look all the way back to the beginning of this post, to the photo of a slide presented by Bill Nussey of Silverpop. Now, I've been friends with Bill since he was with Greylock, and I've known Silverpop since it was still ActiveGrams, but for cryin' out loud, Bill! This slide consisted of white text on gradient backgrounds that faded from pale-grey to even-paler-grey. Completely and totally illegible. There may have been good information on this slide, but it certainly didn't survive transmogrification by the artists.

Other companies did this, too. (I'm looking at you, Paul!) It seemed the more mature and well-financed the operation, the more the slides were outsourced to artists. I'd take 30-point Arial on a black background before any of them. (And I hate Arial.)

Kitchen Sink

Finally, too many of the companies seemed convinced that they had to use their six minutes to throw in everything plus the kitchen sink. Way, way too much information. Look, a pitch at an event like this is an advertisement. You're supposed to wind up with a call to action (shockingly few did that) to convince interested investors to come see your booth, or visit your Website, or whatever. You can't possibly get across all the reasons he or she should invest in six minutes and a handful of slides.

Hit the high points, hit them hard, display them clearly and legibly, repeat them if you have time, and sit down. If there's any interest, there will be lots of time to make the minor points and add clarifications later.

Overall

If I were assigning letter grades, I'd give:

A	1
B	3
C	4
D	11
F	2

That's embarrassing. And sad. And unnecessary.

Starting a company is hard. Displaying a decent slide deck shouldn't be.

If a CEO can't get the basics right... why should I be convinced that anything else in the company will be done right?

---

PS—since I know I'll get asked, the A and B grades would have gone to SoloHealth, Multicast Media, Zenda, and MFG.com. The other grades... maybe you shouldn't ask.

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I got into a discussion about Georgia Tech academics the other day, when I mentioned how difficult the undergraduate curriculum was. The other person (who graduated from a state university that shall remain nameless) retorted with "Well, Tech doesn't even have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa!"

That's true. We don't. And I started digging into why.

From the "Stipulations" on the ΦΒΚ Web site:

Grades earned in applied or professional work shall not be counted in computing the grade-point average for purposes of eligibility. Applied and professional work shall be understood to include those courses intended primarily to develop skills or vocational techniques in such fields as business administration, education, engineering, home economics, journalism, library science, military science, physical education, communications, secretarial studies, speech, and applied art and music.

Well, excuse the hell out of me.

I actually don't have an engineering degree, although I've worked in an engineering capacity more than once during my career. But I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluva engineer, even if my diploma says theoretical physics. (Summa cum laude, thank you very much.) And these pantywaist literature majors from Swarthmore and Vassar Dickinson have the temerity to lump engineering courses in with P.E. and "secretarial studies"?

Scroom.

If those are their rules, we don't need a ΦΒΚ chapter. They are clinging to a worldview and a set of rules that are increasingly irrelevant, if not downright harmful.

The "Two Cultures" debate goes back a lot further than C.P. Snow, but I'm tired of this attitude that engineering (and the associated "hard sciences" and mathematics) are somehow superfluous for the truly educated. There's not an engineer alive who would say "Sorry, I can't read." But if you propose a math problem any harder than splitting the check at lunch, I bet half the English department at Duke would throw up their hands and say "Sorry, I can't do math."

(Of course, I suspect most of them also can't write a clear English sentence at gunpoint, but this isn't a post about deconstructionism.)

The classic "liberal arts" major (which is what the self-perpetuating ΦΒΚ aristocracy is claiming to be the ideal) has a lot to be said for it. Studying classical history, the Great Books, a bit of Latin and Greek, and the rest of the underpinnings of Western civilization made a good background for a young man (for it was always men, back then) to go into the City of London or to Wall Street and manage institutions that were based on the strengths and foibles of individuals. If you knew a bit about how Caesar managed his campaigns, or Lee managed his lieutenants, you had a better chance of managing your Midwest regional vice president and making sure he made his numbers for the quarter.

Now, however, businesses are based on more than that. Internet speed means you'll be making decisions in far less time than Caesar or Lee enjoyed. Global connectivity means you will be managing staff in Bangalore that you may have never met. And, of course, your white-shoe Wall Street firm has a back room of "rocket scientists"—in reality, bright science and engineering majors—developing a dizzying array of financial derivatives such as credit default swaps that allow you to pyramid your profits to the sky.

Oops. Did someone mention "credit default swaps"?


I think there was some math involved there. Didn't you say you couldn't do math?

I minored in history at Georgia Tech, back when that was technically impossible. (I actually never got a "minor" designation; I just took a bunch of courses, and read one heck of a lot outside of class.) I think every educated person should understand the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire and the connection between Columbus's voyages and the Renaissance. And he (or she!) should have read and thought about and written about some Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Tennyson. (And Kipling, dammit!) And we should all be competent in at least one foreign language. (I'm not, and I wish I were.)

But every educated person should also be able to solve a series of linear equations, or guesstimate the power consumption of a server rack, or give a layman's explanation of private-key cryptography. Technical problems are important in today's world, and top managers don't have the luxury of just saying "let the geeks figure it out." Because that road leads to credit default swaps, or multi-millions of dollars wasted on failed SAP implementations, or cancellation of nuclear power plants that would emit less radiation than the coal-fired plant you build instead.

So the ΦΒΚ types don't think our "applied and professional" courses are good enough for their precious honor society? Well, I'm not terribly impressed with what the ΦΒΚ keyholders have done to our financial system, or our government, or our educational system. Maybe it's time to give the engineers a chance.

Because a "liberal arts" education is no longer enough. If young men and women want a well-rounded education that prepares them for the real world we're living in... they should major in Mechanical Engineering. That's the liberal arts degree for the 21st century.

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