What is the 10 20 30 rule?

The rule in Kawasaki's words

Guy Kawasaki published The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint on his blog in December 2005. His summary is plain: a presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes and contain no font smaller than thirty points. He argued that ten is the right number because a normal person cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting, and that if a founder needs more than ten slides to explain a business, they probably do not have one. He listed the ten topics a venture capitalist cares about: problem, solution, business model, underlying magic or technology, marketing and sales, competition, team, projections and milestones, status and timeline, and summary and call to action.

Twenty minutes and thirty points

The twenty minute limit, Kawasaki explained, comes from the reality of a one hour meeting: setup problems eat time, people arrive late and leave early, and the rest of the hour belongs to discussion. The thirty point minimum forces text onto the slide to be the essential point rather than a script, because thirty point type does not fit many words. For anyone who finds thirty too dogmatic, he offered an alternative: find the age of the oldest person in the audience and divide it by two. On a widescreen slide 13.333 inches wide, thirty points is about a thirty second of the width, which on a 1920 pixel canvas works out to roughly 60 pixels.

How founders use it today

Few current decks follow the rule exactly, and investors do not count slides. What survives is the discipline. Y Combinator's seed deck template, written by Aaron Harris, covers a similar list in about ten slides and warns founders against writing a treatise. Kevin Hale's design advice for Y Combinator demo day decks, to make slides legible, simple and obvious, is the thirty point rule restated for a room of five hundred people. In practice many teams build a ten slide main deck that follows Kawasaki's topics and move detail such as financials and the full competitive analysis into an appendix.

Common mistakes

The first is hitting ten slides by cramming: twenty bullet points on a slide in twelve point type meets the letter of the rule and defeats its purpose. The second is treating the ten topics as fixed when the company's strength suggests another order, such as traction before the solution. The third is running twenty minutes of monologue in a thirty minute meeting and leaving no time for questions. The fourth is ignoring the rule entirely because it is old, when its real point, choosing what matters, is timeless. The fifth is applying the font rule to a deck that will only be read on a laptop, where slightly smaller type is fine.

Where the rule does not fit

The rule was written for a presented pitch in a meeting. A deck sent ahead to be read alone often needs a little more text, because nobody is there to explain it. A board pack, a training course or a detailed sales proposal has different jobs and may reasonably run longer. A keynote may use sixty image slides in twenty minutes, which breaks the slide count while keeping the spirit. Use the rule as a check on focus rather than a formula for every presentation.

Where it shows up in the product

Each of Kawasaki's ten topics maps onto one of the 26 slide roles here, as the table shows, so a brief that names the ten topics produces a deck in that shape. The length slider runs from 3 to 20 slides; set it to ten before generating, since it opens on three. The canvas is 1920 by 1080, and text fits itself to its box, which means a slide with too many words shrinks its type rather than overflowing. That shrinking is the signal the rule is being broken. The Lumen Freight seed deck example uses twelve slides, a cover and an agenda around Kawasaki's ten.

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