In my experience, the team overview slide in the average entrepreneur’s presentation is often the least effective. There’s good reason for this – cramming a high-level overview of 2-4 backgrounds into a series of bullets nearly always results in a “word wall”. A “word wall” is a slide that has so many words on it that it looks more like a page of an essay than a slide. That format doesn’t work well for presentations – nobody wants to read an essay when they’re listening to a presentation.

So how do you show off your team’s accolades without overloading a slide with text? You show, not tell.

I recommend that you use the following format for your team slides. Next to each team member’s photo, put their name, title and tagline. The tagline should be a slightly fun 2-3 word description of that person’s story. Some examples:

• “Serial entrepreneur”
• “UX guru”
• “Machine learning thought leader”
• …You get the idea…

Below the tag for each person you should include a few academic or work related logos that represent the experience of the person. While the logos won’t explain everything that each person did at that institution, it will brand their experience with investors and queue up conversations about their experience. If your investors want more information about the team, they’ll ask and you can tell them or send them follow up information. In the meantime, by putting less on the page investors will digest more.

In my experience, the team overview slide in the average entrepreneur’s presentation is often the least effective. There’s good reason for this – cramming a high-level overview of 2-4 backgrounds into a series of bullets nearly always results in a “word wall”. A “word wall” is a slide that has so many words on it that it looks more like a page of an essay than a slide. That format doesn’t work well for presentations – nobody wants to read an essay when they’re listening to a presentation.

So how do you show off your team’s accolades without overloading a slide with text? You show, not tell.

I recommend that you use the following format for your team slides. Next to each team member’s photo, put their name, title and tagline. The tagline should be a slightly fun 2-3 word description of that person’s story. Some examples:

• “Serial entrepreneur”
• “UX guru”
• “Machine learning thought leader”
• …You get the idea…

Below the tag for each person you should include a few academic or work related logos that represent the experience of the person. While the logos won’t explain everything that each person did at that institution, it will brand their experience with investors and queue up conversations about their experience. If your investors want more information about the team, they’ll ask and you can tell them or send them follow up information. In the meantime, by putting less on the page investors will digest more.