Currently at the San Diego airport, on my way back from the annual start-up launchpad extravaganza Demo Fall 2008.

While listening for two days to what amounted to over 70 companies on stage - no matter whether US or overseas presenters - I was surprised to see how culturally homogenous the presentation style turned out to be.

Sure, Demo’s organizers (it seems mainly the omnipresent Chris Shipley) pre-determined the permissible presentation format.

But this doesn’t fully explain why the new software pitch of a French executive sound virtually indistinguishable from the one just delivered by his peers from the US, Italy, or India.

Clearly, everyone was free to market their innovation as they pleased. And they certainly did.

To that end, the vast majority of company presentations went something like this:

“The world of digital technology is facing a fundamental (fill-in-the-blank) problem”;
“Hello, I am the CEO of (fill-in-the-blank) company, and I can help”;
“This is how we solve the puzzle posed” (several details plus a live demo follow);
“Thank you, be sure to visit us at our booth”.

With that, overseas presentations were (luckily) surprisingly void of lengthy, Euro-style powerpoints or meticulous “every-detail-I-can-think-of” product descriptions we might expect from, let’s say, an Asian or European engineer.

But how did Demo manage to curb those cultural idiosyncrasies for the benefit of fairly digestible “plain English” start-up pitches, without so much of an attempt to structure things?

To be sure, Demo’s secret sauce is a 6-minutes-only, live on-stage presentation format. No tele-prompters, no reading off cards. Instead start-up representatives directly address a diverse audience of peers, investors, and media representatives to promote their individual wares.

Yet, despite these deliberate limitations, overseas presenters seemed amazingly “at home” and (well) prepared to equal their US counterparts on quick-and-plenty use of American-style rich adjectives and superlatives to get their points across.

As a result, the conference hall quickly filled with verbage insinuating nothing short of “bold vision”, “clear direction”, and that “unshakable sense of purpose” every start-up should have - only here at times delivered with the added sincerity of a Taiwanese, Italian, or French accent.

Begs the questions, are our overseas presenters merely mimicking their US counterparts or is there such a thing as an “American presentation style” that has become as sure an export hit as Apple, Coke, or Google?

Let’s face it, the art of marketing wasn’t invented in Zurich or Shanghai. And marketing starts and ends with words.

As it stands, Silicon Valley start-ups not only deliver tremendous innovation globally, but also the lingo that comes with it. That was new to me.