As discussed in last week’s post, we attended a conference from Wednesday to Friday. We made some new connections, watched some intriguing startup pitches, had some excellent seafood (or at least I did—it was obvious who was the Southerner and who wasn’t from what Bill and I ordered at restaurants), and I even lost my voice temporarily as a result of trying to have a conversation amidst the din of a live jazz band. The band was great, but a networking happy hour was not the right setting. If anyone reading this is ever a conference organizer, please keep that in mind.

I attended most of the sessions, and they were a mixed bag. A couple were classic death by PowerPoint. Way too much information was packed onto each slide and the text was so small that even the speaker had difficulty reading the text. I don’t understand why people continue to think that even though their own eyes glaze over when they see a slide with a wall of text that they should do just that in their own presentations, but alas.

Sitting through one of the vapid presentations, I mindlessly scrolled through my phone looking for a distraction. Having removed social media and news media from my phone, none were forthcoming. This gave me a few minutes for reflection, so I focused my attention on why I had so little interest in this talk. The idea that I turned over in my mind was this: it is more important to transmit emotion during a live presentation than to convey information or sell an idea. This was an idea that I came across via a podcast and one that runs counter to my own inclinations, which is probably why it stuck with me. The keynote speaker fully embodied this idea. I don’t know if he even had a core message, but I was ready to run through a brick wall after hearing him speak. And while the preceding sentence is hyperbole and the message was about embracing obstacles in order to overcome them, the speaker’s brilliance was the emotion he conveyed through pregnant pauses.

Even in startup pitches, emotion carries tremendous weight. Most pitch decks have the same three or four graphs and you learn to ignore J-curves. Especially at the seed stage, companies don’t often know what their product or their market really is and investors expect this. Investors are looking for people and teams to invest in at early stages. Numbers become more important later, but even then the hard data is reviewed in advance and not during the investor meetings themselves.

I know that many of us don’t give presentations on a regular basis and that almost no one has given a live presentation in at least several months. I also know that I plan to give live presentations in the near future as that becomes increasingly possible. Maybe this post was just a reminder to myself, but I’d like to think that a few readers will benefit as well. Don’t neglect the emotion of an in-person presentation. That emotion can be the most important part.