The real reason I stopped being a CEO is Keynote
Or, how I used Decker to make a retro presentation
(\__/)
(>'.'<)
(")_(")
I needed to create a presentation.
But all I heard inside was NOOOOOOOOOOO.
Not the NO that is overcome-able with a little willpower. No, this was the NO that leaves you paralyzed, a depressive NO, a burned out NO, a NO that makes you sit and stare until you give up and move on to something else.
The team needed together time. In person. It was in the air — edges crack, people gaze far away on zooms, typing quietly, slight eye rolls, passive aggressive remarks.
When a team gets together, there should be a presentation. Because well… because… hmm maybe I should have questioned that assumption now that I look back.
But I didn’t, so I opened Keynote and tried willing the presentation into existence.
A few minutes later I found myself on TikTok for “inspiration.”
Listen, business presentations are triggering for me at this point in my life. I’ve made hundreds of these dumb things. Most people watching the presentation have no idea how much thought and energy go into it. The meeting ends, people disperse, no one cares. You never get a thank you for a presentation. Except maybe a “thankful that it’s over.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if the reason I stepped out of my CEO roles was because I was tired of making and giving presentations.
But here I find myself, temporarily stepping back into an interim sort of CEO role, and with that comes the need (/expectation?) to make presentations.
The weekend before the offsite is when I stumbled on Decker.
If you’ve ever used HyperCard — and you probably haven’t — Decker is a modern version of it. Hypercard was an ’80’s Apple product that let people link pages and objects together pre-WWW (hypermedia). Here’s a tour of it. You can see how pages can be linked together through buttons and such. People made “choose your own adventure” stories, small apps, and games. (The game Myst, for example, was originally created in Hypercard. I remember giving up on that game as a kid, too many puzzles.)
It’s black and white with retro graphics and even better: it’s not Keynote.
I tried it first on the web, but downloading a new file every couple minutes to save my progress became exasperating.
But I did create this amazing welcome slide:
Look at the tasteful combination of capitals and lowercase that would have my elementary teachers smiling proud!
Freshly installed on my Mac, and armed with the power of autosave, I proceeded with the next section. An invitation, if you will. I even added some animation, because why not.
Where’s the animation? You can’t see it, because I can’t be bothered to screen record, get it to loop correctly, then convert it to a GIF. That will take minutes. If I don’t keep writing this will become a draft that is never sent, like all the others.
I started feeling self-conscious at this point. This is stupid, I said. This is not what people are expecting. It looks like a child did this. A time traveling child from the 80’s that had a difficult time with letters. Maybe they’ll think I’m not taking things that are very serious, not serious. And I’m not! I mean, I am — I am pretty stressed out or whatever — but life‘s too short to be serious all the time. I didn’t quit school just to become a corporate drone. I wanted adventure! Cool things! Basically, Decker.
Might as well lay out the future as I see it, made with buttons and badly drawn text.
The original has actual text in those boxes, but isn’t the mystery more fun?
As I got the hang of it, I found creating slides therapeutic. Like raking sand in a zen garden (which I’ve never done but sounds calming), or punching a pillow until I collapse on the ground, exhausted (which I recently did for the first time, which is how I know I’m stressed but growing).
I found I could invert the colors which is actually pretty exciting when you only have two colors to work with. And I toyed with animation, creating the concept of entropy, which is surprisingly easy because entropy is about the easiest thing that can be created:
I also wanted to communicate a little about myself, because a company’s values often come from the founder — and for better or worse, that’s me:
And then there’s a new goal — a goal that I never thought I’d ever articulate — but after stepping into a company with “NOTHING TO SEE HERE except oh yeah surprise here’s a couple million in debt sucker” it became a very important goal:
I stepped out of this company a couple years ago, and after a founder leaves, culture tends to drift.
A business can be … okay to be honest I just deleted a bunch of stuff I wrote, because it was didactic and boring. I’ll move on, because…
I drew those letters with boxes in about 30 seconds. I find a stupid amount of pleasure in that.
There’s a bunch of other slides in there.
Most of them are ridiculous.
But I got to spend time with people that I like, we started building cool things together, and I learned Decker.
We bowled. We argued. We ate. We laughed.
But no one cried, so I guess we can level up.
Until next time,
Josh
In 8th grade I won an award at a HyperStudio event. It was about Jupiter and one of the buttons triggered a laser disc video clip to play on a TV adjacent to the Apple IIGS. I remember getting out of school to go to a big room in a Sheraton hotel to show adults how it worked.