The main reason I was in San Francisco was to attend Presentation Reboot run by Garry Reynolds from Presentation Zen and Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design. Gods amongst those that do presentations in Powerpoint or Keynote or I suppose Google Presentation since some use that. It was a day-long course and yes it was very much worthwhile the 12 hour flight over and back. Well I did get to visit Silicon Valley for a day or two on top of this.
Photo owned by Serdal (cc)
Duarte Design is in Mountain View (where Google have their HQ) and is on the same street as: Smug Mug, EyeFi, FriendFeed and Evernote. Walking to the place and seeing all those famous companies was pretty inspiring all in itself. I wonder how many people randomly knock on their door and say thanks for the good work. Maybe I should have? It wasn’t just the trainers too that made the day great. I met some very nice people there. I only googled Sally when I got back which is a massive shame as she’s a hugely impressive figure in California politics. I would have loved to have chatted more. Ric from the Powerpoint Team was there and his colleagues too and he mentioned Presentation Camp SF was happening on Saturday so I signed up for that when I got back to the hotel. More on that in a little while.
Presentation Reboot was very practical in nature with Garr and Nancy tag-teaming during the day. We even got pens and paper and glue out for storyboarding sessions. Yes it’s worth the money and worth the time to go. Get their books if you can’t go and sub to their blogs at the very least. Nancy blogged about the workhops herself here.
So later in the week, the day I was heading back to Ireland in fact, I went along to Presentation Camp San Francisco in the Slideshare HQ. The room names were those of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rocking. The Slideshare staff were wonderfully helpful. They make such a great product too. A great deal and very diverse set of talks during the day. Ones I liked most were the ones from Cliff Atkinson (Cliff blogged about the day here) and Scott Schwertly from Ethos3. Cliff is another presentation God so it was nice to meet him. I must get him to sign a copy of his book when I bump into him next. Oh did I mention I met Seth Godin the other day for a few seconds? Yeah I did. SF rocks. Rashmi from slideshare presented about Slideshare too. Almost meta!
I missed a few presentations because I had to head to the airport, the most talked about one was from Dave McClure, more a presentation about pitching that on presentations. Great content all the same: “How to Pitch a VC (aka Startup Viagra: How to Give a VC a Hard-On)”
And because I have a signed copy of Presentation Zen and Slideology, I’m going to give away the existing copy of each book I have. They are some of the best books on this subject area and should be eaten and ingested. Want to win them and a medium size Slideshare t-shirt? To do so, simply create a presentation saying why you should win them and put it on Slideshare.
