TLDR

  1. Engineer slides to leave a specific audience with a specific takeaway
  2. Each slide should make a single point, communicated by the title
  3. Titles must be assertions, not topic labels

Craft the narrative arc with your goals in mind

Before touching the slides, answer in order:

  1. Who is the audience? Example: investors
  2. What decision or action should the presentation drive? Example: hype up the company on your behalf in the partner meeting
  3. What takeaway will maximally inspire this action? Example: company is a rocketship that I want in on
  4. What is the one sentence the audience should remember? Example: revenue is quadrupling

Then, outline using just the slide titles.

  1. Each title should be a concrete statement, not a topic label
  2. Reading only the titles should tell the complete story
  3. Test: would someone be compelled by your “ghost deck” if they were convinced the statements in the titles were true? Ghost deck: slides that are blank other than the title. You should actually make this and page through it.

Finally, select 3-5 key messages and check your narrative against them.

  1. If you have more than 5 messages, cut. The audience will not remember more than 5 things.
  2. Vinod Khosla: “engineer an email”: your audience will summarize your deck to someone else. Design so that summary is the one you want.
  3. Iterate between this and your ghost deck as necessary.

Only now are you ready to actually touch slides.

Each slide should make a single point, communicated by the title

The title is the assertion; the body is the evidence.

  1. Each slide should capture a single idea
  2. After reading the title, the audience should understand the idea
  3. After reading the body, the audience should believe your idea

Simplicity inspires belief. There’s a human tendency to support a point by shoveling out a laundry list of mostly-related evidence, but this instinct is bad. A single, clear plot will do more to convince your audience than five plots. If the plots are making different points, they should be on their own slides. If you can’t support the idea with a single plot, your idea is too complex.

The slide must communicate real information. “Healthcare is broken” makes an investor say “well duh”. “We make a 100x better dialysis machine” communicates something real. The investor may not believe your assertion immediately, but after seeing your single, clear plot they should.

Put extra information in an appendix

Some percentage of your audience won’t believe some percentage of your slides: you simply don’t have the space to present a proof with the rigour of a scientific paper. Add things to the appendix to keep these people on board.

Good things to put in the appendix:

  1. Counter-arguments to reasons for skepticism
  2. More evidence that backs up your point (but was too distracting from the key narrative)
  3. Text or number-heavy details

For appendix slides, the rules are loosened, particularly around conciseness. Still try to obey as many as possible, but you can be more generous with the amount of text.

Slide Rules

Titles: must be assertions

Every slide title MUST be an assertion, not a topic label.

  • BAD: “Market Opportunity”
  • GOOD: “The market is growing 40% annually and no one serves segment X”

The title alone should convey the slide’s takeaway. If the title is a topic label, rewrite it.

The 5-Second Test: does the point stick?

Put the slide on screen for 5 seconds, then remove it. Could someone describe the key point? If not, simplify. This is the single most important quality test.

Visual Focus

Each slide gets exactly ONE focal point — the single place the viewer’s eye should go. If there are competing focal points, split into multiple slides.

Structure

  • Open with the problem. State it in the first 1-2 slides with emotion, not technical detail. 80% of presentations fail to make the problem clear until too late.
  • Lead with the answer, then support it. Especially for executive audiences: conclusion first, evidence after.
  • Address risks head-on. Acknowledge the top 2-3 concerns and show mitigation. Never hide information.

Formatting

  • Generous whitespace — light fonts, open layouts
  • Vary slide layouts across the deck: mix full-bleed images, split layouts, single-statement slides, and chart slides
  • No decorative-only elements. Every visual must communicate.
  • Max 25 slides for a pitch deck. For other contexts, aim for 1 slide per minute of speaking time.

Concision

  • Every word must earn its place
  • Target: ≤15 words per slide body (titles excluded)
  • Visuals carry the message; text is reinforcement only
  • No bullet points — use images, charts, diagrams, or single statements

No useless flavour images

Images in the slide body are good, but they need to support the point made by the title. This is often better achieved by a simple plot or graph.

Example: slide titled “Every human has experienced a bad weather forecast”

  • Bad: a picture of a thunderstorm with lightning. Doesn’t communicate anything; is just flavor.
  • Acceptable but suboptimal: a picture of a meteorologist pointing at the wildly differing possible hurricane paths. Makes the title’s assertion feel more plausible via a scenario, but doesn’t directly prove the assertion.
  • Good: a map that shows (with real data) that the lead time on an accurate forecast is really bad everywhere. Directly supports the title.

Checklist

  1. Read only the titles in sequence. Does it tell the full story? (Ghost deck test)
  2. Does every slide pass the 5-second test?
  3. In polished mode: are there any bullet points? (There shouldn’t be.)
  4. Are any titles topic labels instead of assertions? Fix them.
  5. Count words per slide. Are any over the mode’s limit?

Reference points

John Dean’s Claude skill

More Perfect by Christian Keil. A masterclass in storytelling through slides.