Double check your slides

I saw 25+ startup pitches this week at a series of meetups and was surprised that roughly 25% of them had formatting issues.

It's not a good look whether you are someone speaking for a multi-billion VC firm or a startup asking for investment — especially if, for example, your product involves using carefully tuned algorithms to meet compliance challenges.

In some cases I think the use of non-embedded custom fonts may have been the cause of those formatting issues. So organisers should probably remind participants about font portability. If in doubt, use fonts that you know are safe for the operating system running on the machine that you will be presenting on.

In any case, formatting your slide well shows that you respect your audience and yourself. So, double check your slides and don't let small discrepancies tarnish your credibility!