What’s a Prezi?

That’s what I said when my daughter (age 10) came home from school last April and said “Mom, we learned Prezi today!” My struggle to stay up-to-date on technology rivals my flailing attempts to stay informed on pop music (I thought Robin Thicke was Alan Thicke making a late middle-age comeback… and yeah, I thought “t’werking” meant “using twitter like a jerk”).

Prezi is the new “Keynote” (which is the new “Powerpoint”) and it’s all the rage in tech-forward academic circles. Oh wait. You don’t know what Keynote is? It’s MAC Powerpoint. Powerpoint?

It’s McKinsey crack. Still confused? Don’t worry. Two years ago, I didn’t know any of this.

Welcome to the tech ride, Mama. It’s real. And it’s coming from the bottom-up.

So why the pressure?

After my daughter showed me the Prezi she’d made in school, I got to thinking. It was very modern. It was very cool. And it looked very user-friendly. I mean, if a 10 year old could figure it out!? Why not use it for Totefish? I decided to make an About Us video using Prezi. It would be more interesting than a long, promotional write-up on the website, right? Who reads those, anyway?

I spent 5 months working on it. Yeah. That’s right. I’d never used Powerpoint or Keynote (although my daughter has made at least 4 presentations of each) so my learning curve was steeper than most.

But you know what drove me through it? Fear of disappointing my daughter.

Do as I say, not as I do

I am one of those women who believes men and women should have equal opportunity to do anything. Because of that, I filled our house with trucks, building blocks and rainbow-hued legos when my daughter was born. I ended every Disney story with the line, “And she lived happily ever after she got a great job, invested her money in a diversified portfolio and ended up buying her own castle on the beach.”

When my daughter turned 8, I sat her down and said “Things are going to change around here. I’m going to start a company so now, we’ll have a babysitter pick you up at the bus-stop.” Her response?

“You can’t start a company. That’s what Dad does.” FOR REAL.

Failure is not an option

In the last two years, my daughter has been privy to the stresses, struggles and realities of achieving my dream to launch Totefish. Although I always lace my talks of Totefish with warnings of “the odds of it working are slim” and “the average entrepreneur fails 4 times before they succeed”, my daughter tells everyone that her Mom is a building a big company. She also tells them that I’m an expert on Prezi. Expert?!? Not even close! But I have spent the last 5 months showing her my baby-steps of improvement. It’s become our thing. We don’t talk fashion. We don’t talk Miley Cyrus. We talk Prezi.

I showed my daughter my finished Prezi this week. Her response?

“I love you, Mom.”

I can’t think of a better reason to Prezi than that.

Here it is (converted to a YouTube video):