Exponential Investment for Everyone

An art director and a technology journalist made over an investment entrepreneur’s sales deck. Here is what we learnt.

• Get to the point fast

• A picture is worth…

• Less is more

An EPIC investment opportunity

EPIC co-founder Elianne Oei wants to give a much wider range of people the opportunity to invest in early stage companies. “I want to have more equitable distribution of wealth,” she says. “Right now, the rich have a lot of options to get richer. The threshold for investing in exponential companies is still high. Normal people like my Mum or my sister can’t step in because you need $1 million or $5 million or $20 million.”

Exponential companies have a massive, transformative purpose (such as Google’s “Organize the world’s information”) and a set of organizational attributes which allow them to achieve it. EPIC investors can invest in revenue-making, exponential companies which are aligned with the UN’s sustainable development goals. Investment starts at $2000 per deal and EPIC companies share a percentage of their revenue with investors instead of giving up company equity.

EPIC selects the best companies, structures the revenue-sharing deals and pays out regular revenue share to investors. Eli needed a presentation which would convince potential investors to take the first step towards investing with EPIC.

Get to the point fast

Eli already had a draft presentation for EPIC’s monthly online information session for investors. In an online setting the audience is even more likely to drop out than during a live presentation so it’s crucial to get their attention fast. Eli’s original presentation had 45 slides and the product wasn’t fully defined until slide 42. Even when some preamble or definition of terms is required to explain the offering (as in EPIC’s case) it’s essential to get your core concept across in the first few slides. We reworked the slides so the opportunity for investors is clearly defined at the start of the presentation.

“It’s really being clear about the key messages and the purpose of the presentation.,” says Eli. “You did an excellent job of clarifying those and condensing it down. That was very valuable.”

A picture is worth...

We added new slides explaining how EPIC works and the value that it provides to investors but even with this extra material the final presentation only contained 25 slides, 20 less than the original draft. Eli emphasised how important visual design was in the process of condensing the content. “It’s an amazing skill that visual people have to put essence into visuals,” says Eli. “I do think visually engaging content is valuable.”

Less is more

Eli’s original presentation used a lot of buzzwords and her message was sometimes obscured by elaborate language. It was hard to determine what the product actually was and how it differed from existing investment offerings. Even when explaining a complex topic, simplify and use plain language as much as possible.

Original Slide

New Slide

Lessons from Linja's Shoes

A technology journalist and an art director streamlined a shoe entrepreneur’s story. Here is what we learnt.

• Start with a structure

• Pick a colour palette

• Remix and reuse

Head over Heels

Bianca Blom is a Dutch entrepreneur who spent years working with an orthopedic shoemaker and the finest Italian craftsmen to create the designs for her comfortable high heel brand Linja. “Heels are my passion,” she says. “It’s so much more than just shoes. It’s the feeling that I get, and that a lot of women get, when they wear heels. And high heels were a product which hadn’t changed in 50 years.”

Bianca was asked to speak to 200 employees at the innovation centre of Dutch bank ABN AMRO. I worked with art director Nathalie Hennequin to create the presentation from scratch.

Start with a structure

We started by interviewing Bianca for over an hour. Bianca is not a linear speaker and her fascinating story has many different aspects. As a journalist, my job is to guide interviewees towards the content which is most relevant to a particular audience and to highlight the most important points. For this audience, we decided to focus on the various innovations Bianca made in her product and business model, as well as entrepreneurship lessons the audience could apply within their own field of finance. We created a one-page list of bullet points to serve as a basic structure for the presentation before starting work on the slides.

“What for me was key was that you really could pick the points that needed to be highlighted,” said Bianca. “That was the best added value because I tell my story over and over again and to me some elements might not seem that important. You highlighted not only the product innovation but also the pricing innovation and distribution innovation. For me that was just one blur.”

Pick a colour palette

Nathalie then started work on the design. She selected a palette of colours from Linja product photos and reused them in subtle ways throughout the presentation, including in the text.

“When I used to do presentations, I only showed photos because I am a very visual person,” said Bianca. ”I was not that keen on text. But the way you have done it makes sense. These are not bullet points. I loved how Nathalie took colours from the first photos of the shoes and those colours come back throughout.”

Remix and reuse

A presentation should evolve over time as you learn more about what resonates with your audience or address different audiences. Bianca has already remixed the original version of the presentation to talk to students at the Nyenrode Business University. She dropped certain slides and reordered others to tailor the presentation to that audience.

“I now have five students of Nyenrode doing their company project on Linja,” said Bianca. “They said we loved your story. I use this presentation now everywhere I go. You just never know who is in the audience (The CEO of fashion brand O’ Neill connected with Bianca after seeing her talk at Nyenrode) and you get asked to speak more.”