Nancy Duarte: How To Present Your Pitch & TED Talks

Nancy Duarte is a pro when it comes to presentations. Not just giving presentations, but starting them, finishing them, and every step in between. Author and co-founder of Duarte Designs, Nancy Duarte is a seasoned veteran when it comes to incorporating storytelling into speaking and creating connections with an audience.

Learn How To Present Your Pitch

The below video is the final part in a series of 10 in which Nancy shares the key components to making a successful startup pitch using creativity and critical thinking. Find out what she has to say:

Learnings from Nancy’s TED Talk

If you’ve ever watched a TED Talk, you know that they’re packed with enough inspiration, wisdom, and advice to make you go out and save the world before the night is over. You could say those talks are high-stakes, and Nancy would agree.

Nancy spoke at TEDx New York, giving a talk entitled “The Secret Structure of Great Talks.” The master of presentations herself was giving a presentation on presentations.

Only about 3% – 5% of TEDx talks make their way onto the official TED website. If Nancy was going to do something, she wanted to nail it.

She spent over 35 hours practicing her presentation – rehearsing, videotaping, getting rid of ticks, rehearsing some more. She had a coach who analyzed her 18 minute talk down to the second, offering up suggestions like when to spend four seconds speaking on a topic as opposed to 13.

Nancy delivered her talked with perfection, as she does, but was disappointed to see that after more than a year her video was not yet made it to the TED website and had garnered 60,000 views. Instead of moving on, she took to Twitter.

After tweeting about how she was excited to have so many views on her talk and tagging TED in the tweet, she promptly received an email from them letting her know they wanted her video on their website. Nancy says she was running around the office like a chicken once she heard the news. Mission accomplished.

Her talk now has over 1 million views, and has brought in a ton of business to her company.

“I had to create my own momentum around my own talk and then they picked it up, which was huge,” Nancy recalls.

Let Nancy’s own experience, much like that in her previous step, serve as a TED Talk in itself. As a startup company, you’ll be giving presentations – internal and external – that will require careful communication to get you to where you want to be.

Hopefully you’ve added a few skills to your collection over the past 10 lessons from Nancy Duarte. We encourage you to check out all the lessons from our network of experts on Startups. But don’t worry, more summaries are to come!