Venture Adventure

Rohit Sharma, of Mohr Davidow Ventures, led a discussion about what goes into the entrepreneurial pitch. This event was part of the Stanford BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students) E-Challenge business plan competition.

Rohit’s main theme was that powerpoint is a necessary evil. But it is evil, so be aware of what you are doing. Avoid bullet points, use a sans-serif font, use no more than 5 lines, and use cue cards so that you don’t have to look at the screen to read your text. Most of this is (or should be), by now, common knowledge.

The best part was Rohit’s reference to Edward Tufte, and his seminal book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . This was the first time I’d heard Tufte mentioned outside statistical circles, and Rohit was highly complementary of Tufte and VDQI. Hopefully this will be of use to the Stanford students, both in the entrepreneurial efforts, and in their student life.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 1:40 pm and is tagged with Event Review • Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.