Three Simple, Valuable Pitch Lessons From Twitter's $1 Billion IPO Presentation

You can learn a lot about simplicity from a company that encourages you to share ideas in 140 characters. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Chief Financial Officer Mike Gupta are holding invitation-only meetings with investors in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco to stir up interest before the company's IPO. Twitter is expecting to raise between $1 to $1.4 billion in its first public offering. The stock is expected to price on November 14 and to begin trading on November 15. With this kind of money at stake, the Twitter roadshow could be one of the most lucrative presentations of the year.

I've worked with pre-IPO executives to help craft, refine, and deliver their roadshow pitches. Goldman Sachs has called me in; as have other underwriters and executives who went on to have lucrative and famous IPOs. While I did not participate in the Twitter pitch-and I would not be writing about it if I had- I did watch the 37-minute video that Twitter posted on line. Costolo and Gupta delivered the presentation, and it reflects the messaging and the slides they are delivering behind closed doors to large investors.

Here are three simple and valuable lessons from the Twitter pitch that you can (and should) incorporate into your own presentations.

Design slides to highlight key statistics

One of my favorite techniques to deliver statistics is to choose the one number that means the most to your audience and design the PowerPoint slide to feature that statistic only. Most presenters clutter their slides with data and additional statistics that only confuse and distract the audience.

Slide number 40 in the Twitter IPO deck is an example of a simply designed statistic slide. Here Costolo addresses the benefit that Twitter offers to its advertisers. He says, 'Mobile has already become the primary driver of our business.' Costolo then emphasized that 71 percent of advertising revenue is generated from mobile devices. The only number on the screen: 71%.

In another slide Costolo says that 350 billion tweets have been published since the company was founded. Again, a powerful enough number that should stand on its own. Why clutter the slide?

Build messages into three parts

Those of you who regularly read my columns know I often suggest that three is the most powerful number in communication. Carving up key messages into groups of three or, at most, four, makes it easier for the listener to follow the story. Think about how you remember a phone number. Most of us chunk the first three numbers, followed by the next four. Threes were all over the Twitter pitch. Here are just a few examples from Costolo's portion of the presentation:

'Twitter is a new way to create, distribute, and discover content.'

'Twitter is public, real time and conversational.'

'We've seen tremendous organic growth. We now have over 230 million monthly active users, 77 percent of those users are international, and 76 percent of our monthly active users primarily access Twitter on a mobile device.'

'We are the place where journalists go to share stories, where politicians and heads of state engage with constituents, and where comedians, celebrities and athletes make direct connections with their fans.'

'We've aligned our growth strategies around three primary constituents: users, platform partners, and advertisers.' [these three strategies formed the outline of Costolo's presentation].

Chief Financial Officer Mike Gupta also used threes to simplify his messages:

'There are three key drivers underlying our advertising business: reach, engagement, and monetization. I will now walk you through each of these key metrics in detail...'

'Twitter has three ad products: Promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends.'

Following the rule of three allows you to create simple, uncluttered slides. Here are some examples from the Twitter pitch:

Use examples to support key messages

Cognitive studies show that it is very difficult for most of us to process abstractions. That's why the best presentations are concrete, tangible. And the easiest way to make your message concrete is to use examples-lots of them. Dick Costolo certainly did. Costolo used more than fifteen examples to reinforce his messages in his 30-minute portion of the presentation. That's the equivalent of at least one example every two minutes. Here are just a few examples with corresponding slides.

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