Is the $1 Billion Powerpoint Really a Thing?

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We’ve all sat through bad slide decks—but what about the ones that change history? In this episode of Is This Really a Thing?, Dean Paul Jarley is joined by Jim Balaschak, Dr. Mike Pape, and Derek Saltzman to explore whether the so-called “billion-dollar PowerPoint” is myth or reality. From Airbnb and Tesla’s iconic pitch decks to the role of storytelling, trust, and investor psychology, they unpack what makes a presentation powerful, what doesn’t, and whether AI or new tools might one day dethrone PowerPoint.

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Episode Transcription

Paul Jarley: We’ve all sat through terrible slide decks, but every so often a PowerPoint does more than communicate. It creates value. Think of the pitch deck that launched Airbnb, the presentation that convinced investors to fund Tesla or the strategy decks that shape billion dollar mergers. So is the billion dollar PowerPoint really a thing? Can a few slides actually change the course of business history, or is it just a fancy way of describing really good storytelling?

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? Onto our show.

To help me figure this out, I’ve invited three guests. Jim Balaschak is an alum of the college, in our Hall of Fame, and a serial investor. Dr. Mike Pape is an Entrepreneur in Residence here at the College of Business, and Derek Saltzman is a former winner of the Joust and is co-founder of a company called Soarce. Thank you gentlemen for being here today. We’ve all seen really bad PowerPoints. Talk a little bit about what makes a great one. Jim, I’ll start with you.

Jim Balaschak: A PowerPoint that catches my eyes shows a big potential market, a problem they’ve identified that they have a solution for that they can make money on. It’s not necessarily always the slides, but the slides can quickly convey the idea of the thoughts. And a lot of times before I meet with a founder, I’m emailed the pitch deck and going through the pitch deck helps me determine do I want to pursue this to the next step, get on the call with the founder, have them pitch it to me? I think it’s a good way to open the door.

Paul Jarley: The quality of the pitch deck tells you something about how serious and well thought out this is, right? So a schlocky one can really close the door, maybe more than a really good one can enhance it. Is that fair in your view?

Derek Saltzman: Yeah.

Paul Jarley: Derek, what do you think?

Derek Saltzman: I think there’s a lot to take into consideration with the audience and the stage gate of when you’re first starting a pitch or when you’re trying to interact. There’s multiple decks for multiple stage gates. So in the first beginning intro, like for instance, how Jim said, when you’re trying to send and get that initial meeting, it’s all about a hook. Can you describe what you do in the most succinct, effective way possible to get the message across of what the problem is, how you’re solving that problem, and what’s the revenue potential like he described? Because that’s what all investors are really looking for. Once you move past that initial stage gate, you have much more detailed decks that go into your financials that go into your true revenue model, your business model, maybe your IP strategy, and a variety of other topics. The overall optics and the overall clear messaging is I’d say the two biggest things.

Paul Jarley: Mike, what do you tell students?

Michael Pape: The way I deal with the pitch deck is treat it as just one element of a much bigger picture. The bigger picture is what is the business plan? Which you can express verbally and in the old days, if you will, back in the 90s and being part of this first company I did, we wrote that 40-page business plan. It was a very static document, but it had all the elements that we teach about what is required. Do you need a compelling problem, you need a solution? What’s the market? How are you going to market it? Who’s your team? What’s your financial model? All those types of things. So the pitch deck, I just see it as neither here nor there, because it is a way to communicate. The way I talk about this is I kind of view things as a trajectory and the pitch deck is purely in my opinion, a consequence of two things, changes in technology over time, and the other is the just madness of the rate of change of the world, and it creates an easy way to change on the fly.

So the first one, if you think about the trajectory of technology, we always have to present your pitch, whether it was to Wall Street or a merger, an acquisition in some form. PowerPoint came out in ’87 I believe, and really didn’t grab hold till the mid 90s. It was clunky, it was terrible. There was no way to show PowerPoints through a Zoom-like thing. All those things never worked when we do a pitch to VCs or whoever You’d have to print out your PowerPoint. You’d have to print, also, a relatively long business plan document and it was just a lot of friction, and that became really problematic and the people could reduce that friction, they kind of won the game. And Microsoft PowerPoint and just from preparing scientific slides over the years, my gosh, what a savior. You’re getting new data all the time. Before we used to have to take photographs, have the slides. If you just look at that progression of things, the PowerPoint as we have it is a value because it’s a very succinct way to bring in all the important business elements that you’ve got to communicate one way or the other.

Paul Jarley: Now the AI can do it for you.

Michael Pape: Well, it’s –

Paul Jarley: To a degree. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Is that a good idea?

Derek Saltzman: Uhm, no. I think there’s a balancing act. I think there’s definitely, you can utilize the tools of AI to get the ball moving, get in the right direction, but AI is not going to build the business for you. You still got to go out and talk to the customers, build the relationships, develop the actual business, and something to Pape’s point. In the kind of more of course, AI age, more modern age things, I feel the investment cycles have gotten compressed kind of how you’re describing where you’d have to develop a 40-page business plan and really describe how you’re going to attack a market that is almost archaic now, where seed rounds are going a $25 million seed round, $30 million seed round because they have 10-to-15 really great slides and they have AI attached and they’re rocket shipping like crazy. So it’s a really interesting dynamic depending on the business.

Paul Jarley: Here’s my real test on the value of a PowerPoint. Tell me the one that you saw that really stuck in your mind without revealing any secrets. And what about it really stuck in your mind?

Michael Pape: There’s two I got in my mind. One is Dropbox. It is not a pretty PowerPoint. However, it was a compelling problem. We didn’t have cloud computing. We had the USB drives, we had the floppy disks, we had all that stuff all over. Nobody would communicate. You’d have to carry the USB drive.

Paul Jarley: You’d forget it.

Michael Pape: You’d forget it. The flash drives, remember? So if you look at their PowerPoint, they’ve got a picture of just a messy desk with floppies and the things all over, and then they came up with their solution and you’re like, everybody I’m sure just stood up.

Paul Jarley: How about you, Derek? Which one do you remember?

Derek Saltzman: One for us being in the deep tech space is a company called Solugen, and to Pape’s point, one of the really interesting things that they do is just, it’s storytelling. How do you take a really complex, difficult topic like chemical refining and distill that down to really digestible information for someone to understand, oh, you use this chemistry or these processes to develop these things and you sell it for X amount of dollars.

Paul Jarley: Jim?

Jim Balaschak: I think one of the ones that caught my eye is recycling of batteries to repurpose like for EVs, because that’s going to be a really big problem. So just seeing how much of an environmental impact this is going to be and how much can be saved if things are recycled. That really impacted me and is a company we invested in.

Paul Jarley: So if you can’t articulate the problem, you’re in trouble. Right?

Michael Pape: The goal of a PowerPoint in front of investors or potential acquisition partner is to get the next meeting. That’s its goal, that’s its role, and then you’ve got to come up with another one and another one. You’re not going to get investment on your first presentation.

Derek Saltzman: No.

Michael Pape: Your goal, if you remember this, I told you guys, your goal is to get the next meeting

Derek Saltzman: One hundred percent.

Michael Pape: Somehow, some way. And sometimes the next meeting will be a lunch, it won’t be a PowerPoint. Sometimes they’ll just be hanging out and having a drink at a conference.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah.

Michael Pape: So, its role has really got to be minimized to some degree just to maintain the conversation so you can build trust and they can perform due diligence in whichever form they deem fit.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah. Every day you don’t get a no is a closer step to a yes. That’s how we look at it.

Paul Jarley: Our Joust is in the 20th or 25th year. It’s been around a long time. I’ve always thought that in that setting and in business plan competitions, generally, the winner is the group that can tell the best story. That the data really doesn’t drive it very much, that it’s pretty much an emotional decision. And I wonder if that is disconnected to what you guys just talked about … getting the next meeting. Because I worry sometimes that a lot of our students are really good at winning competitions. That’s not the same thing actually as attracting investors. What do you think about that?

Jim Balaschak: I agree. It’s the best presentation …

Paul Jarley: … presentation that wins that …

Jim Balaschak: that wins the Joust.

Paul Jarley: Almost all the time.

Jim Balaschak: Yes. It’s not always the best business idea or best team that can execute the idea. It’s a valuable thing for the students to go through. There can’t be that much due diligence done on a company that’s up there pitching for 10 minutes and has 10 minutes of Q&A. I think it’s still a very good thing for the College to have, and it gets a lot of excitement and interest, and I think it sparks quite a few people.

Paul Jarley: It’s a culture building tool for sure.

Derek Saltzman: Yes.

Paul Jarley: Have you ever invested out of any of the companies that were in the Joust?

Jim Balaschak: I have, yes. But –

Paul Jarley: Were they the winners or were they the team that finished second or third?

Jim Balaschak: I have invested in one winner, it was about five years later. They were a very good presenter. They’ve taken their idea and pivoted several times, but the founder is tenacious, so I’m betting a lot on the founder with that investment.

Michael Pape: If our frame of reference is the students and we’re educators. For them to get up in front of a big crowd, and defend is invaluable. And they’re nervous and it’s like, you know this better than anybody because it’s your business. Be confident. I mean, that just goes so far. Most of them never been in front of a crowd like that where –

Paul Jarley: Yeah, you get serious quesitons.

Michael Pape: It’s nerve-wracking. Totally.

Paul Jarley: I remember the one group where one of our judges made the presenters cry in the semifinals, and the final part of that story, not to mention Merrell (Bailey) by name, would be that they came back and won the Joust.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Paul Jarley: They took that advice to heart.

Derek Saltzman: Right?

Paul Jarley: Yeah.

Derek Saltzman: And as someone that’s kind like trial by fire and walked through that kind of ring essentially with my co-founder. Like Jim said, you’re not going to, at the end of the day, convince an investor to give you an investment on that day. Like Pape said, it takes multiple meetings, multiple interactions, and truthfully, everything is an emotional decision. We’re humans. Whether we want to think we make logical decisions, we’re truly making an emotional decision at the core, and it’s how do I like the person? Do I invest in the jockey? Do I believe in this person to get the job done? And it’s very different when you’re a student, say pitching a research topic, it’s about the science. The science doesn’t lie. It’s like this happened, this happened, this happened. But when you’re going, you’re pitching a business. It’s your idea of what you think you can bring value to the world and extract money from people from. It’s a very humbling experience when you get told no on stage, they grill you with really difficult questions that you may not be able to answer as fast as you’d like, but that trains you to build the thick skin and the nerves necessary that when you’re pitching to a variety of investors, you get pretty used to saying, no, that doesn’t make sense, or move on from here.

Paul Jarley: Derek, what’s your company Soarce? What does it do?

Derek Saltzman: We’re a materials company at the core. So what we do is we developed a process that allows us to take natural feed stocks like basically hemp, wood and seaweed and extract and tune or functionalize specific nano biopolymers such as nanocellulose. So these are tiny little nano fibers that are 10,000-times thinner than in human hair, eight-times the strength of steel. And then we use those and we put them into a variety of different industrial applications. Our goal over the next couple of years is kind of innovate on the overall composite industry.

Paul Jarley: Your degree is in?

Derek Saltzman: Material science and engineering. So background in material engineering. Didn’t start that way. I started off as an aero engineer, then took a couple classes with Pape and we were really into the business side and said, hey, we like this chemistry thing. We should maybe build a business in it.

Paul Jarley: I would imagine describing material science properties to investors is a little tricky.

Derek Saltzman: Oh, yeah. It’s definitely different.

Paul Jarley: I glazed over when you first started for a second.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah, it’s definitely a very different topic. So that’s why we’ve learned there’s different lanes of investors. So there’s investors and investors strictly in SaaS companies where they know how to evaluate a SaaS product. They understand the growth and development cycle, and then you have other individuals that are more into the hard sciences and deep tech sciences, which you have to my right here, a chemistry guy.

Paul Jarley: Exactly.

Derek Saltzman: There are two completely different paths. They all have different outcomes in the end. For us, we sit in more in the deep tech science side where we have to take a really hard chemistry topic and distill that down into really easy, digestible information to then give to investors so they see, oh, that’s the actual value. And to do that, to your point, it’s a lot of visuals. I mean, we deal with nano material, so when you’re saying we deal with stuff that’s so small, you can’t see it. It’s hard to say, “These tiny little things can produce a lot of value for the world.”

Paul Jarley: Ultimately, our podcast is about what we should teach our students. So talk to me a little bit about how you hit the sweet spot between the data and your presentation.

Michael Pape: When I look at the pitch deck, it’s a knowledge framework, and that’s how we basically teach. We teach frameworks. In marketing, we teach the three C’s and the four P’s. We can teach theories like the diffusion of innovation. We’ve got a variety of different frameworks that we teach students in all our classes. Science has the same thing, whether it’s thermodynamics or biochemistry, there’s frameworks and pathways by which we hang new things that we learn as time goes on in undergraduates, basically just to learn the basics. So the pitch deck I have found very helpful because it does provide a framework by which you can hang the data in there. If you’ve got what this slide is, then all the times you’re pivoting and changing, you morph it over time as you get more data. So it becomes the base, and then you just slide in what you need. The other power of the PowerPoint is if you work on it enough, you become a better team because it forces you as a team to actually get something on pen and paper or electrons. Because that makes you more precise rather than just talking about it. And that is a critical piece of it. Furthermore, when you’re talking to other people, what usually happens, I think the good presenters, in their mind, they have their PowerPoint and they rifle through the slides that they’ve already prepared and they know where they are, and that becomes a really powerful framing mechanism by which you can pull out that slide. We worked on that slide here was the main message. You’re not showing them the slide. You are just, it’s so embedded.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah, you do it so many times, it becomes kind of an ingrained pattern in your brain.

Michael Pape: That’s its power.

Paul Jarley: Can you imagine the day that the PowerPoint dies in favor of something more dynamic? Given the tools that we have these days? Are we going to see short movies on business concepts generated by AI?

Derek Saltzman: Actually, I think we’re already there. We’ve actually seen a couple of startups already do that. Startups that we’ve met, that their pitch deck is a mini, one minute skit. I don’t know if they’ve generated investment from it yet, but it’s an interesting concept.

Paul Jarley: Are there companies out there that will help invent do that? I would imagine there are.

Michael Pape: If it will help a company get the next meeting, by all means.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah. Somebody, one of the companies that we’re really close with is a company called Pageport. They essentially automate this process, so they help basically take businesses that are difficult to describe and make it really easy for you to get video updates or this great content from them. We’ve used them, they’re awesome.

Jim Balaschak: I think I like the PowerPoint. I like to spend a certain amount of time on each slide analyzing, okay, let me see the competition slide.

Paul Jarley: Because the investors are old school, right? Let’s be honest about this. I’m not sure how I would react to a short movie on it, right? I might think, oh boy, I am really getting marketed to death here.

Michael Pape: The new school at the end of the day is going to do just what Jim said because they’re going to go through their due diligence and they’re going to have to sit down and go through material if they’re going to be a good investor or if they’re going to do a true due diligence on an acquisition target.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah.

Michael Pape: At the end of the day, you’re only going to be as good as your understanding of business and frameworks and that stuff we teach here, which will not go out of style no matter what the mechanism or the modality is.

Paul Jarley: It’s just the tool.

Derek Saltzman: That’s right. A hundred percent. And I think a great company that also exemplifies that is a company called Potato. No one would think of like, okay, a company called Potato, but they’re doing amazing in one of the top –

Paul Jarley: It’s memorable.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah. It’s one of the top AI research tools that we use in a variety of researchers.

Paul Jarley: What does it do?

Derek Saltzman: Basically it distills research papers for scientists in a much faster, more meaningful way.

Paul Jarley: Yes or no, is the PowerPoint going to stay around and can it generate a billion dollars worth of revenue? Jim?

Jim Balaschak: Yes, the PowerPoint is going to stay around. Can it generate? Not right off the PowerPoint. It can lead to the meeting that leads to a round to another round to another round, another round to another call, and then you’re at a billion.

Paul Jarley: Derek?

Derek Saltzman: I’ll echo what Jim said there. I think the PowerPoint is cemented in for a while here that we’ll continue to use it. I think there might be some new tweaks and tools that get utilized, but at the other core, like you said, it’s going to be to get to the next meeting and have that next conversation.

Paul Jarley: Professor Pape, as is our culture in the College, the faculty member gets the last word.

Michael Pape: Yes, it is important. It is a thing. It’s a powerful framework and you can rapidly change it in an ever-changing, warp speed culture that we’re living in right now, particularly with respect to technology.

Paul Jarley: It’s my podcast, so I get to go last.

My distaste for PowerPoint runs deep. I think it usually gets in the way of stories rather than enhancing them. And storytelling, after all is one of the most powerful tools any leader or entrepreneur has. That’s been true since the invention of the campfire. Yes, there are legends. Airbnb’s 2009 pitch deck of just 14 slides allegedly raised their first $600,000 seed round. The company’s worth over $100,000,000,000 today, and by the way, employs my daughter Maggie. Facebook, Peter Thiel’s deck in 2004, really just a few slides, secured a $500,000 angel investment and set the stage for a trillion dollar company. But let’s be honest, it’s never the slides that make the deal. It’s the power of the idea and the belief in the team’s ability to execute it. PowerPoint just happens to be the messenger and like all tech platforms, it won’t be king forever. One day something will replace it, just like Google replaced Netscape. So is the billion dollar PowerPoint a thing? Yes, but only until the next big thing comes along.

So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. You can also find extended interviews with our guests and notes from the show. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.