I've been watching it for 8 minutes as of now and despite the fact that the content looks good it really bores me to death that he is reading the whole thing like a robot. It does not sound like a natural converstation or presentation. Does anyone else share this feeling?
Some people prefer making presentations having only some general idea of what they are going to say before hand. Other people spend a good deal of time thinking about exactly what they want to say and how they want to say it. Both presentation styles are perfectly valid.
Agreed that both presentation styles work. That said, regardless of the "strategy", the delivery needs to be clean to be seen as authoritative (unless a tremendous amount of respect as been pre-built). Imagine your CEO delivering an all-hands with 47 ums and reading from a script -- how much confidence would that instill?
I really enjoyed sama's delivery. It was easy to digest; not too fast, not too slow; important ideas/concepts were repeated but not overly so; the choice and sequence of topics covered was very good. Length was just about right too.
I hate it when speakers "over engage" and keep throwing in jokes, personal anecdotes, rhetorical questions, funny slides etc. in a perceived need to keep people's attention. If a presentation's worth listening to, the content (delivered in a friendly and relaxed way) should be all that's needed to keep an audience engaged. If some people haven't got the attention span for that, it's usually their problem not the speaker's.
I think it was a bit choppy, but not distracting by any means. I think having the text is great because it makes the delivery more efficient. All too often presenters, including myself, tend to circle back on a point, even repeating statements as they "find their way" or determine their next point. It can be confusing as a listener and therefore having a script helps to reduce this. The value of this (free!) course and the speakers FAR outweigh any issues with delivery/presentation style etc.
Totally agree. The content is great, but the delivery is uncomfortable (both speakers). I stopped watching and just listened. Ultimately, the content is the most important thing and I appreciate the opportunity to access awesome content. If anything, I think the first lecture helped humanize the whole "start-up scene". From the outside, it seems like everyone has figured it all out, but clearly we all have areas to improve.
Lastly, given that this will be so broadly distributed, I totally get the need to be on message so it may make sense to read in this scenario.
FWIW, this was the same content he gave us at Hack The North when he was visiting less than 24 hours ago. It makes sense to copy it down and repeat it rather than try to memorize all of it.
I'm not sure this is about memorization. Teachers give the same content over and over again and do not memorize (in the sense of repeating it until it's memorized). Great presenters do not memorize their speeches. They practice it until it's natural.
I agree that content is king, but the one reason why we attend to classes, events and speeches is to see a great delivery of the content being presented. If not, better handle the written version by email and be done with it.
I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs wouldn't be remembered by his presentation skills if he read the whole thing. That's also not the reason why I remember my physics teacher from 10 years ago.
True, they I'd have to agree it was something else then that made him choose to read from notes. We still shouldn't judge after just one lecture though.
People are getting way too hung up on the fact the he read from a text. But so what? The content was interesting and compelling. I'd rather listen to somebody using a prepared text and conveying the information quickly (like Altman does here) than painfully reading slides.
I thought he did a good job. Usually I hate watching a video presentation if there's copy of the text to read. It's way more efficient to read the content than to watch most videos and then set the speed to 4x.
