The slide format was created in the 1980s to design overhead projector slides. 40 years later, the way we work has completely transformed but we are still stuck with this slide format. Not only is it extremely time consuming and tedious to make great presentations, the affordances of this format make it extremely easy to make bad presentations. 

Today, Chronicle is announcing a new storytelling format to revolutionize storytelling. 

Founded by Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande, Chronicle believes that this problem needs to be solved with world-class information design.

We are making a completely new way to make impactful, interactive presentations that are effortless to create. Creating presentations on Chronicle is completely different from hours of pixel pushing. Instead of spending hours tweaking slides, Chronicle allows users to create with ‘pre-designed blocks’. These blocks are interactive and are designed with world-class information design in mind. This radically reduces the time required to create a story that is highly impactful. We want to deliver a dummy-proof creation experience – layouts are created much like arranging widgets on your iPhone meaning it’s impossible to make a bad-looking Chronicle presentation.

We have spent the last decade helping thousands of people make presentations while working in product, growth, and management consulting roles.

“This started at university where I accidentally ended up teaching lecture halls full of students to build presentations because they thought I’d developed some kind of new interactive format. In reality, I was spending hours hacking Powerpoint to deliver a novel, interactive and engaging format.

Today, with the explosion of social media, remote work, and a plethora of modern design tools, the world is ready for a new way to tell stories. I’m so excited that I can now bring that power to create visually stunning stories to anyone in seconds or minutes, not hours.”

~Mayuresh Patole, co-founder and CEO

We realized big changes were happening in how people were telling stories – both in the creation and consumption experiences.

“Social media has completely hijacked how people consume complex information. Attention spans have reduced by 33% since 2000 and have given rise to shorter formats across almost everything we consume. Today, most audiences stop paying attention to the presentation at the 10-minute mark.

As younger generations have entered the workplace this feeling of ‘death by Powerpoint’ has only grown more acute.“ Simply making tools that lead to faster creation of poorly designed slides with chartjunk and bad information design only aggravates this issue.

~Tejas Gawande, co-founder

Users are also spending hours making bad presentations. Employees spend, on average, more than a month every year writing and finessing these presentations. We were struck with a strong realization when they saw users move from conventional slide-based design tools to simpler formats that offer one core thing that users want – convenience.

The problem is not that you cannot create great presentations with existing tools but rather the tools do not help in the process. Not only do existing tools and formats make it very difficult to deliver great presentations, but they also make it quite easy to make bad ones.

We also want to make storytelling a joyful experience. To do this we’re breaking the tyranny of the slide and replacing it with interactive blocks that work like magic.

Our early adopters are able to use Chronicle to create some of the best decks in just 8 minutes instead of 8 hours. Eventually, we see Chronicle being the best way to anchor any meeting or discussion, in-person, remote, or asynchronous. It is a huge opportunity to impact millions of people who aren’t happy with how stories are told today and we are incredibly excited about it!