The White Rabbit

Alper compares PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, and Canva. Each has its pros and cons, and Alper does his best to stay diplomatic and acknowledge that. 

Listen in on this one if you want to hear a pro weigh in on the "should I export or not" question.

Matt and Alper dig further into an article Alper wrote recently about how the beliefs and mindsets we carry around make it hard to present well.

Interestingly, many of these scripts that run in the backs of our heads are useful elsewhere in other contexts, but can get in the way too!

In this episode, economist Zombor Berezvai goes into the importance of telling stories, even when presenting to academic audiences. You'd think that academic audiences would be fine with the unprocessed presentation of data, but as Zombor reminds us, even those groups prefer the data be presented with a story that makes sense of it.

Zombor's LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zomborberezvai

In this episode, Berk Temuroğlu goes further into organizational changes as a startup's sales base expands to other markets. In particular, how the company's investor base will evolve, how the new investors can help the company, the inevitability of a culture clash during the expansion, and more.

Berk Temuroğlu, in the first part of his repeat guest visit, goes into what challenges a startup, having conquered the world of domestic sales, typically faces when launching into the challenging world of international sales.

In this episode, Berk talks about who to choose to lead the expansion, what he calls "the wheel of engagement," weathering the period of boredom, the inevitable evolution of the organization, etc.

In this episode, Matt goes into three of the constraints he often puts his clients into.

Sometimes the best way to cut is to subject yourself and your presentation to artificial constraints. In real life, you won't have to meet these artificial constraints, but if you're at 39 minutes and you have to cut it to 20 minutes, maybe top-down (39, 38, 37, etc, on down to 20) won't work. Maybe what you need to do is subject it to artificial constraints.

The use of these artificial constraints forces a message discipline that you just don't get with the 45-minute format.

This goes out to all the people out there in their mid-30s who say "My technical skills got me where I am now, so they'll be enough to keep me going."

If that's you, you're absolutely correct about the first part, your technical wizardry, and your development of it, worked great for the first 10 years of your career. 

But over the next few years of your career, you'll see your technical skills become table stakes, and the promotions will go overwhelmingly to the people with technical skills AND communication and presentation skills. Welcome to life after 35.

A couple weeks ago, Alper went into the spiritual side of the business for him. Today we turn the tables on Matt and make him explain the spiritual side from his perspective, and it has to do with bringing peace to others, but not in the way that phrase is usually used.

Berk Temuroğlu goes into corporate managers adopting a founder mindset (and vice versa), the importance of integrating the problem/solution cycle into your communications, and including risk in the ROI calculation.

Berk, being that he has one foot in the startup world and another foot in the corporate world, points out that startup founders have, in recent years, become pretty good at describing the problem, but that this skill is all too often lacking in the corporate world these days. In his words, we tend to "fall in love" with our solution so much that we neglect to give adequate time to the description of the problem.

Also, the way you frame the problem will change according to the audience. It's the same problem, but framed differently. You are basically, as Berk says, a movie director.

Alper expounds on a more spiritual way of looking at presenting. Who would have thought Rumi would come up in a conversation about presentations? And yet in this episode, he does.

Warning: The phrases "existential" and "serving others" come up in this episode, so be careful with this episode if presenting is nothing more to you than firing up PowerPoint and cranking out some slides.