Ryan Jacobs . Org

As an MBA student, I see presentations almost daily. It’s rare that I see a presentation that’s so outstanding that I feel the need to tell others about it simply on the basis of its effectiveness in communicating information. I saw one on Wednesday evening.

The entrepreneur challenge is a series of speakers culminating quarterly in a quick-pitch competition, where locals bring up their ideas for new businesses and get feedback. The speaker list on Wednesday included a guy named Ken Rollins, a lawyer at Cooley LLP in San Diego. Ken’s presentation was on the difference between sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, S-corporations and C-corporations. Like all the speakers, he was given 10 minutes to cover his topic. Note that there are 5 types of corporations here, leaving 2 minutes to cover each. Ken worked effectively with this time constraint, making points clearly but never repeating them. There was no reliance on Powerpoint, and his slides didn’t really need to be there (in fact, I wish they hadn’t been – all he really needed was a list of the 5 types of corporations he was going to talk about). The presentation was impeccably organized: for each corporation type, Ken discussed the structure, the associated costs, the advantages, and the disadvantages as compared to one of the other types. Each corporation type was thus handled. The presentation assumed just the right of audience knowledge – I was familiar with all these terms, but I have never really been given a framework for comparison.

So here is a public thank you, Ken Rollins from Cooley, for not feeling the need to use Latin words in your presentation just to prove you’re a lawyer.