18. John Doerr’s “Chalk” Talks

Three Best Practices from a Top Venture Capitalist

John Doerr, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is in great demand as a speaker. His repute is attributed to his diverse and successful involvements in for-profit companies (Google and Amazon), not-for-profit organizations (NewSchools Venture Fund), and public policy (The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness). Mr. Doerr is often invited to share his experiences, insights, and best practices, and he does so in an unorthodox way: Rather than stand and deliver from a canned deck of PowerPoint slides, he asks his audiences what they want to hear and then fulfills their requests.

Whenever Mr. Doerr steps up to the front of a room, be it a conference center stage or a university auditorium, he polls his audience for the subjects they’d like him to address. He annotates their requests on a large whiteboard—his version of the classic academic “chalk” talk—then proceeds to discourse on each subject. Of course, leaving nothing to chance, Mr. Doerr researches the audience, the organization, and the event, enabling him to anticipate the key themes he might be asked about. To support his discussion, he brings along a few PowerPoint slides to illustrate the themes, and he accesses the slides as he makes his way through his whiteboard list.

In doing so, he provides a role model for three important presentation best practices:

1. Elevate the audience’s primacy. One of the most common faults that presenters make is to sell features rather than benefits; they focus on their message without regard for the audience (witness the one-size-fits-all “Corporate Pitch”). The usual result is a failure to achieve the goal of the presentation. Mr. Doerr’s approach rights the balance.

2. Relegate the slides to their proper secondary role. Undoubtedly, another common fault is to multitask the role of slides; presenters use them not only as illustrative graphics, but also as speaker notes, send-aheads, and leave-behinds. This approach produces images of encyclopedic detail that serve none of the functions. Here, too, Mr. Doerr’s approach rights the balance.

Moreover, in accessing his slides randomly, he employs a useful, but little-known, Microsoft PowerPoint technique:

3. The “Go To” Command. When PowerPoint is in Slide Show mode, Mr. Doerr—or you—can go directly to any slide in the deck by entering the slide number (prompted from a printed outline of all the slides) and pressing the “Enter” key. These simple strokes will jump the slide show directly to the desired slide.

The last technique has three benefits:

• The presenter appears in complete command and control, sending the subliminal message that the presenter is managing the event effectively. Management is the primary decision factor for investors.

• Instant gratification for the audience, nice to have for any human being, vital for every audience.

• The “cool” factor.

In his primary role as a venture capitalist, Mr. Doerr sees many presentations from many companies that pitch him to invest many millions of dollars. Surely, he measures what he sees and hears through the filter of his own best practices.

How would you measure up?