From PowerPoint to Prezi: How Fernando Rych elevated his presentation pitch 

There is always a risk of miscommunication when presenting or sharing information.

However, for a Prezi user, this is not a concern when making pitch presentations. This user is confident that the information has been presented clearly and only needs to concentrate on closing the deal.

Meet Fernando Rych. He’s the founder of an innovation agency where he pitches potential investors and executives. Recently, he met with Danone and Sodexo who wanted to do a huge transformation inside their businesses. They hired his agency as a result of his successful client pitches made in Prezi. 

Discovering Prezi and closing deals 

At the age of 20, Fernando Rych was offered the position of CTO for six companies. In this role, he was tasked with leading executive meetings and presenting at conferences for brands like Coke, Nike, Calvin Klein, etc. These companies were looking to expand their markets to Brazil where Fernando is based. To achieve this, he needed to pitch his presentation on the main stage. 

His goal was to find the best tool to help his audience absorb information. And that’s when he discovered Prezi. 

Once he learned that Prezi was 16.4% more engaging and 25.3% more effective than PowerPoint, he knew he made the right choice. 

“When you change from one slide to another in PowerPoint, you’re losing precious seconds of attention,” Fernando said. 

Improved learning experience 

When he first began teaching, he typically used PowerPoint and Google Slides but disliked how distracted his students were with reading all the text on the slides. With Prezi, he was able to highlight more visual elements, allowing his students to focus on him and not just on the presentation. 

“When you do that in Prezi, it’s a very smooth transition, and you don’t have a moment where you have to scan the entire screen to search for the information before understanding where you are,” Fernando said. 

A few seconds add up, especially as a professor. Fernando teaches MBA courses at the University of Sao Paolo, where he incorporates presentation tips into every lecture. For one of his business consulting courses, he explains how to build a strong presentation, a business speech, and an elevator pitch. 

When it comes to presenting, he says that in a traditional presentation format, it’s “like jumping or teleporting to another continent but with Prezi, it’s like walking your way to that place. You’re able to understand the whole journey and take your time experiencing it – that’s Prezi.” 

Staying ahead of the latest technological trends 

As a LinkedIn Top Voice in information technology, Fernando is always looking to refresh his technological skills and stay up-to-date on the latest tools. That’s how he stumbled upon the Google Developer Communities. He loved the community format of knowledge sharing and wanted to give back as well. Fernando used Prezi to lecture to these communities, helping companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Paypal, Slack, and Twitter, on how to create and empower their communities. 

In total, Fernando has founded 24 communities, supported 950+ events, and put on 80+ hackathons. One of the hackathons he organized was for the United Nations, where he set the Latin America record for most people physically present at a hackathon and was awarded the distinction of Latin American Ambassador. 

When he’s not supporting communities, Fernando works as a Senior Global Innovation Consultant. There, one of his main responsibilities is to find impossible projects and make them possible. 

For all of these presentations, he uses Prezi to make sure they’re paying attention to him and the content, instead of the slides changing from one to the other. Fernando says he uses Prezi on a daily basis to achieve his target results. 

Making Prezi accessible to all 

Fernando loves the reactions and responses he receives when he uses Prezi. He wants to allow others to have that same feeling when they’re presenting. That’s why he only uses Prezi’s templates. 

After an event, people will frequently ask him how to create such fancy presentations. To which Fernando will respond “Yes, I’m using a template. You don’t have to start from scratch to get the same fancy style.” 

If you’re interested in making presentations just like Fernando, get started with a presentation from our library of templates.