Introduction to Presentations

Over the years, the author has prepared delivered a large number of presentations that cover a wide range of business topics.  Audience sizes have varied from a few individuals to hundreds.  Presentation lengths also varied from 20-minute over-lunch sessions to three-hour seminars.  This chapter contains updated versions of those presentations.

All of the presentations were created with Microsoft PowerPoint™ and utilize only the product’s basic capabilities.  The files, therefore, should be compatible with most other presentation software tools.  Only the default fonts were used to also help with portability. The presentation includes standard PowerPoint Notes that are intended to provide the user with background information and more details about each slide’s content.  The Notes, in paragraph form, are not intended to be used in real-time by the presenter as they present to an audience.  The Notes should be thought of as a study guide to be used in presentation rehearsals.   To aide in this activity, a separate PDF file that contains the slide notes is included to allow the presenter to “read along” as they view the slides in presentation mode.

What will become apparent when viewing any of the presentations included in this chapter is that the author has minimal artistic ability!  Hopefully, the user can get past the “visual impairment” of the slides and focus on the content.  Since the presentations were created over many years, the templates and style varied considerably.  As presentations are added to the site (a long and drown out process), their look and feel will be updated to be more consistent. The presentations are not “sales” or “investor” slide shows, intended to “sell” the subject.  Instead, they were created as educational slide decks. As such, the “presentation rules” of lots of pretty pictures, 40-point font, and ten words per slide were not followed – not by a long-shot!

The slides included in this chapter are divided into sections that follow the organization of the CxO-Atlas collection.  With one exception, the presentations included in this chapter are divided into sections that correspond to one of the website Volumes as shown below.  There are several constant themes that are applicable to different presentation topics, so some of the slides appear in more than one presentation.

Section Number and Name corresponding to Volume Name – except as noted below*.

1      Introduction and Overview

2     Seven Principles

3      Starting a Company

4      Managing a Company

5      The Top Line

6      Support and Development

7      Governance

8      Investor Considerations*

9      Everything Else

10   Startup Insights Forum*

Section 8 is an exception to the mapping of chapter sections to website volumes.  Section 8 contains presentations related to raising money and working with financial investors.

Section 10 does not correspond to a Volume.  Instead, it contains the notes created to lead group discussions in a program called “Startup Insights Forum.”  Each forum discussion is centered on one theme taken from the CxO-Atlas website articles.  After a review of the discussion notes, the forum participants informally discussed the subject by asking questions and sharing their experiences with others.  SI Forum notes are typically two pages long and list some of the relevant articles from the CxO-Atlas website.

Going through my past (disorganized) hard drive, thirty-one presentations have been identified.  More will show up later and some of the identified presentations will be combined with others or dropped from consideration.  Below is a preliminary list of the planned presentations and their availability.  This list will be updated from time-to-time.

Once registered on the website, users can download the presentations and the associated Note files.  Users are free to use the presentations as they see fit, requiring only the acknowledgment that the material is owned by RDK Consulting, Inc. and was made available through the wwe.CxO-Atlas.com website.

Presentation Planned and Availability Listing

Updated 10/22/2019