Duarte Incorporated

Nancy Duarte's entrepreneurial journey began not with her own vision, but with her husband's persistence. While Nancy held a "real job" working on mainframes, her husband—a talented fine artist—saw revolutionary potential in the newly released Macintosh computer. He begged Nancy twice, literally getting on his knees, to read a single issue of Macworld magazine. Skeptical but intrigued, Nancy made three phone calls: to NASA, to Tandem (now HP), and to Apple. Against the odds, she won contracts with all three simultaneously. It was 1984, and the Macintosh was widely dismissed by the design establishment as a toy—pixelated, ugly, and utterly unsuitable for serious work.

Nancy and her team entered the market at a perfect inflection point. For about 18 months, professional graphic designers refused to touch the Macintosh, viewing it as beneath their standards. During this narrow window, Duarte Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design (as it was originally called) slipped in and began pushing the boundaries of what was possible. Nancy studied typesetting principles, experimented with colorizing clip art, and worked to make presentations attractive in a medium that most creatives considered beneath them. Apple became her anchor customer, pushing the company to innovate at scale—hooking computers up to massive projectors at venues like the San Jose Convention Center, turning presentations into immersive visual experiences that had never existed before.

The company's first major success came through direct relationships with visionary leaders inside her existing clients. Nancy recalls a sales leader at Apple who wanted to push the medium forward. He asked her to create a slide with nothing but the word "BIG" in hot pink on a black background—something technically difficult to accomplish at the time, requiring her team to convert assets in Freehand, create JPEGs, and scale them up. When the production team saw that slide light up the faces of the audience during rehearsal, they gasped. Nancy realized she had discovered how presentations should be done. This insight—that great presentations could move audiences emotionally and visually—became the foundation of her methodology.

Nancy's big break came through Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." But what's remarkable is that this wasn't an overnight success story. She and her team worked with Gore for five years before the documentary launch, traveling city to city as he seeded the presentation to VIP audiences at places like Stanford. This groundswell strategy built anticipation organically. When the film finally launched, people already knew about the presentation and wanted to see it. Nancy admits she initially thought, "Who's going to go see a movie about a slideshow anyway?" She was wrong. After the film's success, Gore created a train-the-trainer program, flying ambassadors to Tennessee and sanctioning them to spread the message. The presentation wasn't just beautiful—it had staying power because Gore understood the power of repetition and personal delivery.

Nancy also discovered what *doesn't* work: when presentation software fell into the hands of the masses, the medium degraded. Everyone was making "fugly" slides filled with text, clip art, and visual chaos. Her mission became restoring presentation design to its former elegance, treating digital slides with the same care that had gone into 35mm carousel presentations.

Duarte Incorporated has evolved from a design agency into a thought leadership powerhouse. The firm has helped create over 250,000 presentations (a figure she verified by checking actual project records, not guessing). Nancy has become an internationally recognized expert on storytelling and persuasion, delivering a viral TED talk on the "What Is / What Could Be / New Bliss" narrative structure that has inspired countless leaders to rethink how they communicate. Her books, particularly *Resonate*, have become bibles for anyone trying to master the art of influence.

Internally, Nancy practices what she preaches. Before delivering critical presentations to her own team—like annual vision talks—she conducts listening tours through surveys and interviews. She creates rough-cut slide decks without polish, gathers feedback from the next level of leaders, and iterates on the message. She acknowledges that presenting to your own team of presentation experts is harder than speaking to external audiences: "When I'm standing in front of my own team, they're like, 'I wonder what she's going to say because she's about to either make my job harder or she's going to change my priority right there.'" The company's quarterly cadence is now so refined that employees report being genuinely enthused about company communications.