A couple of videos for your weekend viewing pleasure. As I have noted many time before, Al Gore and Guy Kawasaki both get the presentation thing, so here are two new videos of these two presenters in action.

Gore making his pitch under fire
Here is Al Gore making a pitch for An Inconvenient Truth. Gore positions himself near his visual and gestures to it appropriately. Nice form. And he has an unexpected way of dealing with an interruption and handling himself in the line of fire in this clip. So what do you do if you get a drunk, wise-cracking robot heckling your speech? Watch and see. (Bet you never thought "stiff Al Gore" could be so "animated.")

Guy's "inconvenient truth" for entrepreneurs and startups
Here is Guy giving a little "inconvenient truth" of his own in a 39-minute "Art of the Start" presentation recorded just a few weeks ago.(See the video also on Google's site;you can download it there as well). You may have seen him before and read the book, Art of the Start, but Guy is just "on" in this speech. Excellent stuff. Below I list a few of Guy's key "truths" as I jotted them down. Watch the video to get the whole story.

Guy's "inconvenient truths" for startups
My notes from Guy's May 13th "Art of the Start" speech.

(1) Be in it to make meaning not money (if you do the former, the money will come). Be in the game to change the world just a little bit by, for example, increasing the quality of life, righting a wrong, or preventing the end of something good.

(2) Forget mission statements. Formulate a 3-5 word mantra for employees. Mission statements, says, Guy are too long, not unique, and not memorable. Come to think of it, this describes most business and conference presentations too.

(3) Just get going. Get after it. Just do it. Think different. Don't be afraid to polarize people. If it's good, it will surely be hated by some. Jump to the next curve. The goal is not to make it 10-20% better, but 10-20 times better.

(4) Define a business model. Be specific. Keep it simple. Ask women (see the video). I suggest The One Page Business Plan by Jim Horan (forward by Tom Peters). You may actually write a 10-20 pager in the end (lord knows most are longer even than that), but the one-pager is an excellent exercise. And if you can not get your plan on one page, then you may be in trouble.

(5) Weave a MAT. Think in terms of milestones, write them down. Shoot for the milestones. Write down your assumptions. Make it your task to reach those milestones and test your assumptions.

(6) Niche thyself. Create something unique that only you can do. You must be unique and be of great value.

(7) 10/20/30 (10 slides/20 minutes/30pt font). Get your story down before you make the pitch. Guy says 10 slides if you are pitching to VC. Keep it to 20 minutes. If you have an hour meeting, why present for only 20 minutes? Guy quips:

"...you're using a Windows laptop, it's going to take you 40 minutes just to make it work with the projector!"
                                                      — Guy Kawasaki

Never ever read your slides. Say's Guy, "if you start reading your material because you do not know your material, the audience is very quickly going to figure out that you are a bozo."

(8) Hire infected people, people who *love* your product. Hire not just on education and experience, but look too for those who love what you do. Hire people better than yourself. "A" employees hire "A+" employees. "B" employees hire "C"...this leads ultimately to a "Bozo explosion."

(9) Lower the barriers to adoption.  Make it easy for people find you, use your products. Embrace your evangelist community.

(10) Seed the clouds. "Let a 1000 flowers bloom." You never know where great people are coming from or who your customers might be. Let people test drive; find the influencers.

(11) Don't let the bozos get you down. People will tell you that you can't do it. You will be tempted to believe them. But even the brightest have been wrong many times. Be careful not to let bozo advice keep you from implementing a dream.

Related (more or less) links
• Dilbert Mission Statement Generator
• More on Guy Kawasaki's presentation style (PZ)
• Can't get enough futurama
• Speaking of Al Gore and global warming, you may enjoy this post by Adam Richardson, "fixing global warming is an information design problem."