Why Elon, Bezos and US Generals Ban PowerPoint from Meetings

0:00So Neil, you want to know why Elon, Jeff Bezos and US generals ban PowerPoint from meetings? because they're a waste of time. You go over useless crap that could be sent in advance and then people can just review it. And I don't mean to keep rambling here, but I went through a PowerPoint presentation this morning and on the meeting, people were trying to read crap on the slide that I can read myself faster and it's taking them like 10 minutes to go over something. I'm reading in, no joke, 30 seconds because it's bulleted. And I'm like, I can read this myself, move on to the next topic and I just cut them all off.

0:34Yep. Yep. So Sheryl Sandberg did this back in the day. So at Facebook, she was like, no PowerPoints. But then everyone interpreted it as no PowerPoints in the whole organization. But she wasn't saying that. She's just like, no PowerPoints in my meetings, right? Jeff Bezos did the same thing. He says that no PowerPoint presentation now on the S team. The S team was his best team, right? This is an email that he sent in 2004. And he ended up replacing them with the six page memos, right? Elon doesn't like a meter. So no PowerPoint meetings must focus on real time problem solving and not pre-baked decks.

1:06And he told all CEOs to stop wasting time on PowerPoint meetings. And then finally, I'll say General James Mattis. He says PowerPoints makes us stupid. Who's that? He's a U.S. general. So basically, it makes us stupid. It encourages oversimplified thinking, right? So here's the thing, what we talked about. When you do a PowerPoint, it's easy for you to create it. It is harder for the other people and it doesn't foster discussion. We end up having to wait for you to go through your PowerPoint, your stupid deck, go through all your slides. Maybe you design them nice or whatever, but it doesn't get the best horsepower out of that meeting.

1:39And that's why I think it's lazy thinking. So I love PowerPoints. I like them in different scenarios, not in a leadership team meeting. Even leadership team meetings, I like them. All right. Why did you cut people off today? Go ahead. So why did I what? What was the context of your meeting this morning? What happened? Going over our software division, Ubisoft, and Answer the Public. Okay. So what I love PowerPoints for is our PowerPoints. Externally, when you and I present, we both have pretty slides. Those are designed. Internally, when people present to us, they're really ugly. It's just white with just text on them.

2:12Sometimes images. I love PowerPoints because I have my team send them to me in advance and everyone else. So then we can review it all. During a meeting, though, I do not care to go over the PowerPoint. I care to discuss the problems and the metrics that aren't going the way we want and what we're going to do to fix them and brainstorm and actually try to solve problems right then and there in real time. But I like the PowerPoint for just an overview of what's happening. And I don't care if it's in a PowerPoint or a six-page document. I just want bulleted out what's happening, what's working, what's not, issues, just basic stuff like that.

2:49And then from there, I can go and help people. but I don't like people presenting the PowerPoint. I do want the notes though in advance so that way I can be caught up to date. I have a small business compared to the guys you mentioned but because I have so many different divisions and different countries and I would say we're a small business, maybe a medium-sized business. I don't know what we're classified as. It's medium? It's medium. I think that's a good way. I still look at it as small. When I talk to private equity, they consider it a medium-sized business. But compared to these guys, obviously, we're talking...

3:24Compared to these guys, I consider like a micro, you know, small company, not even small. I thought you were going to say something else. No, I don't know what else... But, dude, I don't have a trillion-dollar market cap. No. Like, these guys aren't even multi-billions. They're a trillion-dollar market cap. So, compared to them, I feel like we're like a little speck. But let's just say we're... Yeah, let's just say we're a smedium company. Uh-huh. as a medium company i just feel that still at our organizational size in our employee count it's too hard to know everything in the organization so powerpoints are a great way to be caught up but i think it's a ways for people to present on them i think it's best for uh people to send you the materials in advance and then you can discuss the important stuff where i do like powerpoints for internal meetings and i'm curious what you do here We do all hand meetings.

4:19Do you do all hand meetings? Like everyone? And because people are in different departments all around the world and they don't know what's happening in every single department, for those meetings, I love a PowerPoint to visually show them what's happening throughout the world. Yeah. So we like them for all hands. We like them when we present to clients, for example. And we don't want them to stop using PowerPoint, right? That's not what I'm saying. But I'll give you my point of view on this one, mainly selfishly, because I want this to be a clip so I can send this to all new people who join my team in the future and you're in a meeting with me.

4:49And especially now that we're hiring other people who have a lot of habits from other agencies where they love doing this stuff, the PowerPoint stuff and all that, I'm like, nope, guys, we're gonna do a six-page memo. The reason we do that here, Jeff Bezos said it too, you can't write a good six-pager without really understanding your topic. PowerPoint allows lazy thinking, allows people to hide behind it. And also the other thing is when you wanna call a meeting or whatever, you better think it through and you better write that thing because it shows how serious you are. And the other thing too is, when you do a six-page memo, we don't do it.

5:20And I stole this from Jeff Bezos. The reason why he said this, you don't do this, you don't have people review it ahead of time is because there's so many people that know how to game the system and they know how to not review it and they know how to get by the meeting, right? He says, we spend the first 20 to 30 minutes reading it, right? Sometimes it's a longer meeting and then they have a very messy discussion. That's where I think we agree on this. I think the messy discussion, actually talking through and figuring out what the actions are, that is the most important thing. but I think it's lazy enough when people come in with a PowerPoint and it's kind of half-baked and it wastes everyone's time, right?

5:54It's kind of similar. Like you just don't want to waste time. And so for me at least, what I found, this is what works for me, is yes, like if it's a big thing, people better come with a well-thought-out memo. And if it's not well-thought-out, it's not their best work, we're going to stop the meeting right there and we're going to move on to the next topic. The one thing I do differently than Bezos, I do actually a lot of things not as good as him, but the one thing I disagree with him on and I think it's more so because we're a small company compared to Amazon and I think this still works at our organization size like if you have a thousand plus people like us you can still do it where people send you the information in advance and expect them to review it because I know the people who I'm sending stuff are like when we're in a leadership meeting and a PowerPoint is sent to you know me, my co-founder, our CEO our CFO or head of product.

6:45I know those people are all going to review it ahead of time. So then that way I don't have to waste my meeting time with them for everyone just sitting there for 30 minutes or 20 minutes or 10 minutes reviewing a document that could just be done in advance. So I see where you're coming from. My angle is sure you're saying you have very reliable people, right? No, no, no, not reliable because we're still small in headcount. Let's just round to, let's just round down and say we have a thousand people. When you have a thousand people and you know who's on your calls, your meetings with, especially if they're higher, they're not mid-level managers, but they're, call it mid to higher, you can even say some are mid, and you know them personally, I know in advance that they're going to review it.

7:26If I have low-level associates or junior people that I've never talked to before, I don't know if they're going to review the stuff being sent to in advance. But in my meetings particularly, it tends to be more with executives. And I know they're going to review the material ahead of time. So I don't have to do it where everyone gets it during the meeting and spends the first 10, 20 minutes reviewing. So this is where I still disagree. So and I agree more with Bezos because I've seen this happen. Even my best people, the most reliable leaders on the team, they'll get it maybe 90, 95 percent of the time.

7:57But still, when people actually go and they start writing things into the margins and there's comments back and forth, there's much deeper thinking that happens there versus you don't know. Like if Noah, for example, comes like Noah might be really busy. He might have reviewed it ahead of time, but maybe for five minutes, right? I know for a fact you skim things really quickly, and I do too, right? No, not for internal meetings. I would just say in this situation, when there's that time that's allocated, it's a forcing function, and you end up having a much richer discussion, and that's what I found, right?

8:25It's not to say I haven't done the PowerPoint thing before, but I just found comparing these two things, at least for me, for this clip, for me, guys, if you're going to join my organization, this is how you're going to do it. Well, we tried the Bezos way where everyone reads it at the beginning of the meeting. You've written a six-page memo before? No, where you review the PowerPoint in advance. We would always do slides. You mean during the meeting? During the meeting. And the reason we prefer the slides is you can pick the main topics and you're just bulleting out the main key points, which for us makes it easier for people to digest than a six-page memo.

8:57Yeah. Okay? But sometimes the slides aren't six pages. Sometimes they're 20 pages, 30 pages. we've had it where people review yeah during the meeting so let's say our means are usually an hour and what we found was there was no difference from them reviewing in advance but what we did find was when we had junior people newer to the organization reviewing because every once in a while we have newer people like a new dev who's focusing on a specific area of a product or a or they're joining the meeting, or a new data person or a new project manager, I do see issues of them actually reviewing in advance.

9:39But when I'm dealing with executives who are really vested in the organization, I haven't had issues with most of those people. And most of my meetings, I try to keep it with those people when it comes to reviewing materials and figuring out changes. my meetings with lower level people and I'm not dissing the lower level people it's just a more junior in age and experience I tend to actually focus more with them on what's wrong in our organization that you see that people won't care to listen to you about and I specifically want to know what do you see that's wrong that no one will care to listen to you about and that last part is the most important because if someone's listening to them there's a chance they're going to make changes but a lot of young people see things that are off and a lot of times they have biasness on why their way is right.

10:27But every once in a while, they come up with some really good stuff, 10, 15 % of the time that the organization should do, but no one's paying attention to them and they just dismiss them. And when I meet with junior people, I love that because one out of every 10 times, I have something that we should go change in an organization that I think will change us three to five years later. Okay. I'm going to come back to my clip, right? I'm going to give some examples here. This is for my purposes only. So I see where Neil's coming from. But when you have generals, U.S. generals, another general, H.R.

11:02McMaster, ban PowerPoints in his Iraq command, calling it dangerous because it creates the illusion of understanding and control. Some problems are not bulletizable. You also have Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, disliking bullet heavy decks. But the clearest well-documented ban or hate crowd is Bezos, Sandberg, Musk, and several military leaders. And so the bull case, I'm going to give you the bull and the bear case here, and then we can move on from this topic. I really just want to do this because this is pissing me off internally. So the bull case, one, for no PowerPoint, the bull case for no PowerPoint.

11:29So this is for like more memos, right? One is it forces deeper thinking instead of theater, right? So, you know, again, you can't, if you're writing a six page or a 20 page or whatever, you can't really write one without really understanding your topic. Two, you end up having better meetings. You end up debating the content, which I don't think is impossible with a PowerPoint. I think you can debate the PowerPoint. It's harder to hide weak ideas. I think this one's really big too. So if bullet points are really easy, like slides look really cool and all, it's really easy for people to hide behind them.

11:57And that's why people hate PowerPoint, right? And I think it is, to your point, it doesn't work for juniors especially because this is a situation where you need leaders in a room where it's really dense, right? It's a long document. And then it cuts meeting blow. Now, the bear case against no PowerPoints, this is favoring PowerPoint, right? Memos are really expensive. They take very long to write. The bear case? You mean bull case against PowerPoints? Yeah, bare case against no PowerPoint. So it's the reverse. Okay, against no PowerPoint. Yeah. So memos are very expensive. Yes, it takes very long.

12:26Like sometimes it can take you two weeks to write a really good six-page memo, six-page plus. Not everyone thinks the best from like a written piece of content, right? People need to see slides, visual, like I do too, right? And then some content is really visual. Like Neil shares like a lot of slides and things like that. It's really easy to communicate through slides. And it's also tough to transplant the Amazon and Musk discipline. That's a big one, right? Because for Musk, it's like, One of my friends, he was at a party with a bunch of SpaceX engineers last weekend. Here's what he said. There's an engineer that was working there for nine years, just resigned recently.

12:58And then the engineer was like, so my friend was like, why did you resign? It's like, well, I had a baby and I was working there 70 to 80 hours a week for nine years. And then I came back and I realized I couldn't do it anymore. Point is, it's a very hardcore culture. Same thing with Amazon. So all that to say, I'm not saying PowerPoint is the right way or the wrong way. I'm just saying in a meeting with me, if it's a high stakes conversation, not for me, but we're not saying don't do it in your organization. I think it just depends. No, because there's companies that are successful, whether it's Microsoft and many other organizations that do PowerPoints and they are a four plus trillion dollar organization.

13:34And, you know, I know people who work at Apple and they have PowerPoints and stuff that they go over in meetings. But I think every organization is different and you got to find what works for you. Like, I don't think you and I can run a marketing organization like the NVIDIA CEO where we're pissing in a stall and asking people tough questions. Why not? I can see you doing that. I think that's awkward. I think it's like, I don't know. Dude, all he asked was, how's it going? The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts.

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14:45This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. And the guy was like, so how's it going? The guy's like, no, not much, right? When you're washing your hands, sure. Yeah. But I think certain times, like, dude, just generally speaking, when you go into a bathroom stall, even if you're in a bathroom stall with a friend, are you talking to a friend while you're pissing?

15:19Actually, when I see my seat shooter, I start talking to him. I'm not lying. Yeah, and Noah's nodding his head. So I think it depends. Preferences. That's true. When I'm hanging out with friends, I do talk when I'm taking a piss. Yeah. But when it's coworkers and colleagues. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would say like in this situation, like we're all friends. Right. So it doesn't matter. But we've both been in the bathroom at the same time. Yeah. We saw like in Vegas and we've talked. Yeah. But if it's a coworker, I usually don't talk to him when I'm peeing. No, I don't. Yeah, you're right.

15:49OK. So, you know, this morning, maybe we can talk about this because last week when we recorded right after how many hours did you spend recording content that day after we finished? because we're supposed to have lunch after and then you ditched us again. So, five hours, four? More hours after you? Yeah. How many hours did you spend like last Thursday recording content? You said you just got back. No, you said after you or - Or just total, total, total. In total? Yeah, yeah. More than five hours in the day because I was doing content before the recording for marketing. So like seven hours that day?

16:21Call it like six to seven. Okay. Today will be six hours for me, right? And when it's a content blitz kind of day, you get a little tired at the end, right? Mentally. Yeah, mentally. because it's like, oh, you have to record these short form clips. So you're doing a webinar and then maybe you're doing some long form. Then you're doing a podcast over here. You're constantly context switching. And I was doing a webinar with Adam Robinson today from RB2B. And I was just like, so how much time are you spending on content? He's like, content's everything. It drives all our pipeline, blah, blah, blah.

16:45He's like, I'll do it forever, right? But then on the other side, I saw Alex Becker from Hiro's. Sam Parse shared this tweet earlier this week. But his whole thing is like, you know, you shouldn't build a personal brand because the problem is you're going to have to build this content forever. and it's true. We're like, I hate to say it, but we're stuck doing this content for a while. We're stuck doing it for a while. Yeah, so what's your take on it? I mean, like I can read off that tweet for you, but it's the whole personal brand versus no personal brand debate. I think a personal brand is great to kickstart you, but you should transition away from it.

17:18People still believe NP Digital is me, Neil Patel. And to some extent it is. I wouldn't deny that. But at the beginning of the organization or our founding roughly eight years ago, it was fully me. And if I look at now, I don't think it's more than 20 % me max. So I think you can transition away from a personal brand. Like Kylie Cosmetics is still Kylie Jenner, but the company operates and still does well without her. But without the personal brand, I think it's harder to kickstart in today's world because it's just so much more competitive and more expensive. You think if you're to go through a process in the future, if you were to do that before, you try to wean off your personal brand before you go through a process?

18:00No, we already did. I don't have to wean off anymore. In the future? Well, you came off of this a few years ago. Yeah, we went through a potential sale a few years ago. They said you didn't have to stay on. We had three to four people who were interested in buying. It was either three or four. I don't know what the number was, but I know it was at least three, maybe four.

18:22During that time, people were having questions about key man risk. Okay. You should explain that. Key man risk being if Neil gets hit by a bus, what happens to the business? So the way the business goes away with me. Now, keep in mind, this wasn't the first time we thought about selling. And we weren't taking it serious either this time. It was just more so exercise and be like, is it worth it? Is it not? Yeah. Yeah, and we kind of went down this path a year and a half before anyways. And we didn't take it serious either. And at that time, people had a lot of key man risk. You mean they were saying that?

19:05Yeah, as a business is too reliant on Neil. Yeah. And the reason I actually like going to talk to potential buyers isn't the actual fact of selling. I don't really care about that part. when you talk to other people who are potential buyers they look at your business in a very different lens than you and when you talk to them you get a lot of ideas on how they think about business and how they think about growth from people in your who are acquirers in your space and they've looked at a lot of other businesses in your space and even acquired other businesses in your space and they can give you feedback that you may have never gotten before so that's why i love that process.

19:45So when we did it the second time, haven't done it a third time, but when we did it a second time, people gave us a lot of feedback. No one was really concerned about key man risks. Some people did bring it up, but no one was concerned about it. And the offers came in for more money because we shifted more towards enterprise. If you fast forward to today, a large chunk of our business is enterprise. The largest chunk of our business is enterprise, which is not reliant one bit on my brand. Yeah. You said it was a year and a half. So what do you guys double, triple, quadruple in that time? In that year and a half period?

20:17Because before it went from key man risk to no key man risk. I don't know. I would have to go back in time. But my guess is because in our earlier days, for a while, we were doubling every single year. So my guess is from the first to the second time, at least double, if not more. Yeah. So I'm going to come back to this post from Alex here. So should you have a personal brand or not? So Alex Becker says, if you're considering building a personal brand to sell your service, info, et cetera, a warning, you probably shouldn't do it at all. When you're 20 years old, getting on TikTok and it's YouTube, it's all fun and games, right?

20:56But in your 30s and 40s, you probably don't want to do this anymore because if your income is tied to you being popular and generating attention, you're going to be a slave to maintaining your personal brand. So he mentions Logan Paul here. So he's like not pooping on Logan Paul, but the difference is if you're Mark Cuban famous for actually building a big business versus Logan Paul famous, like famous for being Logan Paul, the insane effort you have to put in to maintain that brand, like WWE, like doing these things, bigger and bigger, right? It's very difficult. But when you look at the number of tech companies, the AI companies and all that, like the ones that are, can you name the CEO of Lovable?

21:29What's his name? I read an article on him today, but I still can't remember. How about the CEO of Cursor? No. Right. Exactly. Right. These companies are growing really quickly. So if you start going with the bigger ones, sure. I'm not going to get the bigger ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're like Anthropic. Yeah. You know, OpenAI. Dario. Sam Altman, right? You know, Anthropic is brother, sister, right? There's four founders, but two of them are brother, sister. And they worked for OpenAI before. Uh-huh. Yeah. But, okay. Point is, like, this is what we're talking about here, right? We're not saying don't start and don't start off with one.

21:57Like, it is very helpful in the beginning. But you probably want to diversify in the future. But you can transition away. And I think that's what you mean by diversifying. And a great example in our space, in the marketing space is Gary Vaynerchuk. He has a massive personal brand. How much of his VaynerMedia revenue do you think comes from him? Not much anymore. It can't. Because if you look at all the content that he publishes, it has nothing to do with a marketing agency. You agree with this, right? And then if you look at his customers, they're all enterprise, Fortune 1000. Don't get me wrong.

22:28I think he's still responsible for a small percentage of the revenue. and yes, the business was built off of him. I'm not trying to discount him. I'm actually giving him more props because I think this is harder to do and I'm going through the same thing. He transitioned it where the quality of the work and his team speaks for himself where he is not required there to close revenue, maintain revenue or scale it up. Don't get me wrong. He is a valuable CEO and he brings a lot of value to the organization and because of him, it probably can grow faster than if he stepped aside. but the company would survive without him.