PowerPoint slides are so high school, but get it right and there is lots and lots of money to be made.

Just ask Mathilde Collin, the 28-year-old co-founder and CEO of the shared-inbox app Front, whose 24-slide presentation raised a whopping $66 million (R892 million) in investment in five days flat.

Collin [below with co-founder Laurent Perrin] isn’t keeping her cards close to her chest, though, because her company shared the pitch deck they used to raise the investment, as well as some tips on how to rake in the cash.

You’ll find the full slideshow here, but let’s just get to the tips.

Cyril Gantzer is the head of Front’s analytics team, and helped Collin create the pitch deck she used for talking to investors. Via Business Insider, here’s his take on putting together a good PowerPoint presentation:

The number-one mistake people make in preparing a presentation, says Gantzer, is that they overload their audience with too much information.

“That’s usually the thing people get wrong. They put way too much on a slide,” Gantzer said. “They still have the document format in mind — the more you can cram on the screen the better.”

…A presentation, on the other hand, should have no more than one message per slide, according to Gantzer. It should take only three seconds to read and injest what’s on screen.

Having short slides puts the responsibility on the presentation-giver to guide their audience through the story they want to tell. In the case of Front, Collin’s pitch deck told the story of Front. It addressed the pain points that Front aims to solve, the achievements of the company so far, and the long-term vision of how Front hopes to reinvent email.

It was also minimalist, which encouraged her audience to read the slide and shift their attention back to the speaker.Gantzer added that the number of slides shouldn’t be a constraint. It’s better to spread information across many short slides than to squeeze a novel into 10 slides, he said.”If you optimize [sic] for the number of slides it’s because you have a rule in mind that you should spend three minutes per slide,” he said.

Just keep it simple, alright?

Maybe something for you to pass onto some of your co-workers, because there’s nothing quite like pissing people off on a Monday to set you up for the week.

Better yet, nick someone’s lunch out of the fridge and watch the office politics kick into gear.

We’re here all week.

[source:businsider]