About this design
Where the 10/20/30 Rule style comes from, and what it signals.
Guy Kawasaki posted the 10/20/30 rule on his blog in 2005: a pitch gets ten slides, twenty minutes and no font smaller than thirty points. He also listed the ten slides investors care about, from Problem to Summary and call to action. With this 10/20/30 rule template you see all three numbers on each slide while you build.
The signature is the clock footer. On slide four it reads 4/10, next to a track of ten segments sized by minutes: navy for time spent, cobalt for the current slide and gray for what's left. The canvas maps to a 16:9 PowerPoint page of 960 by 540 points, so the 30pt floor covers every label, table cell and chart value.
The palette stays small: white slides, navy ink #0f1733 and one cobalt accent #1d3fd8, with the cover and closing in full cobalt. Manrope sets everything, 800 weight for headlines and 30pt for the rest. Headlines stop at 12 words, and the prompt bans any text under 30pt, so the AI has to cut words to fit your Kawasaki pitch deck.
Use it for
- Seed and Series A pitches with a 20-minute slot in an hour-long meeting
- Founders who over-write slides and need a hard word budget
- Accelerator and angel meetings where the partner reads the deck on a laptop across the table
- Practice runs where you pace yourself against the per-slide time window
- Teaching Kawasaki's ten-slide structure in a startup class or workshop
Skip it for
- Diligence decks with dense tables and sourced footnotes; Term Sheet or Pitch Book suit that density
- Three-minute demo day stage pitches; Demo Day fits that clock
- Pitches that follow Sequoia's outline with Why now and Market potential; use Sequoia Pitch Deck
The presentation design prompt
This is the exact text that gets sent to your AI.
Create a presentation in the '10/20/30 Rule' theme, a pitch deck built on Guy Kawasaki's rule: ten slides, twenty minutes, no type smaller than 30 points. Make exactly ten content slides plus a cover, in Kawasaki's order: 1 Problem, 2 Solution, 3 Business model, 4 Underlying magic, 5 Marketing and sales, 6 Competition, 7 Team, 8 Projections and milestones, 9 Status and timeline, 10 Summary and call to action. Treat the 16:9 slide as 960 by 540 points, so 30pt is the floor for every piece of text, footers and chart labels included. Palette: white #ffffff content slides, cobalt #1d3fd8 as the one accent, cobalt tint #dce3fb, navy ink #0f1733 for headlines and past progress, body #2a3350, muted #5b6480, track gray #e3e8f2, rules #c9d0dc. Typography: 'Manrope' (Google Fonts) only. Headlines 800 at 46 to 50pt with -0.02em tracking, cover and closing 60 to 64pt; body, labels and footer at 30pt in 500 to 700; tabular figures. Every content slide opens with its Kawasaki slide name in 30pt bold cobalt, sentence case, then a navy headline of 12 words or fewer that states the point. Below that sits one exhibit and at most two lines of body. The signature is the clock footer on every slide: '4/10' in 30pt 800 navy at left, then a 14px track of ten segments with 3px gaps, each segment's width set by its minutes (Problem 2, Solution 2.5, Business model 2, Underlying magic 2.5, Marketing and sales 2, Competition 2, Team 2, Projections 2, Status 1.5, Summary 1.5, total 20). Past segments navy, the current one cobalt, future ones #e3e8f2. At right, the slide's time window in 30pt muted, such as '6:30–9:00'. Cover: full-bleed cobalt, company name top-left in 30pt white, a 64pt white sentence naming the pain and the fix, founder and round in 30pt white at 80% opacity, the clock at '0/10' with an empty track and '20 min'. Problem: one day drawn as a horizontal bar, working hours navy, unpaid overtime cobalt, times below in 30pt. Underlying magic: three steps joined by thick navy arrows, the proprietary step filled cobalt, the others outlined in 3px navy. Competition: three rows and two columns at most, a 3px navy header rule, 2px gray row rules, the company row tinted #dce3fb with a cobalt name. Projections: four flat bars, navy with the target year cobalt, 30pt values on top, years below, no axis. Summary and call to action: full cobalt again, the ask in 60pt white, one contact line, the track fully spent. Strictly avoid: any text under 30pt, more than ten content slides, bullet lists over three lines, footnotes and source lines in small type, legends, gridlines, tables wider than three columns, gradients, drop shadows, rounded cards, icons, stock photos, a second accent color, centered body text, and implying Guy Kawasaki wrote or endorsed the deck. Use this theme for my slides. Ask me what the presentation is about first, then apply the theme to every slide.View this prompt and its data on GitHub
How to use this prompt
From copied text to a finished 10/20/30 Rule deck in four moves.
- 01
Copy the prompt
Use the copy button, or open it pre-filled in Claude or ChatGPT with one click from the panel on this page.
- 02
Tell the AI your topic
The prompt instructs the AI to ask what your presentation is about first. A sentence or a pasted outline is enough.
- 03
Generate and iterate
Ask for more slides or swap a layout. The avoid list at the end of the prompt keeps 10/20/30 Rule on-style while the content changes.
- 04
Or skip straight to a deck
SlideSpeak turns your topic or document into a finished 10/20/30 Rule presentation, exportable as PowerPoint or PDF.
Common questions
Working with the 10/20/30 Rule presentation design prompt in practice.
