Demo days definitely amplify a brand, but not the one you'd think

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, in light of Y Combinator's bi-annual demo day, Natasha and Alex asked about the utility of the parade of pitches. Our big question: Are demo days outdated? The question comes after Natasha’s latest Startups Weekly column, where she looked into the trend of everyone constantly trying to re-invent startup accelerators. We've seen everything from in-person events, to virtual pitch-a-thons, to record efforts, and more. Name it, it's been tried. Today's show is a continuation of that conversation, specifically digging into how demo days served founders in the past, and how they amplify in the present. There's a good bit of factors that jolted things up, including the proliferation of accelerators, a boom in pre-seed funding and the pandemic forcing programming to go remote. We also ask for whom are demo days really for? Listen in to hear what we landed on, disagreed with and picked for founders to focus on today. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and
0:15.0	welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and
0:19.3	nuance behind the headlines.
0:20.8	I'm Natasha Masquerainis and this is our Wednesday show where we niche down to a
0:24.5	single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week we're asking,
0:28.8	are demo days outdated? As always I'm joined by my bestie and someone that I always cover demo days with, Alex Wilhelm.
0:36.5	Indeed, I feel like the demo day team is like the scarred bunch of like quasi-veterans who've spent too much time staring at Zoom lately, but it wasn't always that way.
0:44.3	Demodays used to have pizzazz and bad food.
0:46.7	I know. I weirdly miss it and I always feel like covering Demodays like brings us
0:51.1	closer together as cheesy as it is like there's
0:53.3	something excruciatingly tiring about it that's because they're excruciatingly long
0:57.2	lately and there's a lot of teamwork and I mean just to give people a little bit of
1:00.6	perspective when Tech Ranch covers let's say a
1:02.5	YC demo day there's going to be several hundred companies and so we want to have a
1:05.9	look at each one to see what's coming up and so it takes like eight of us yeah
1:08.9	so there's a lot of rowing in the same direction and that does bring you closer
1:12.0	together it's good yeah no it's a good thing to look back on and I'm glad we do rowing in the same direction and that does bring you closer together.
1:12.5	Yeah, no it's a good thing to look back on and I'm glad we do it every year but the reason
1:16.2	this episode is coming out when it is is YC demo day just happened.
1:19.7	It just finished we talked through hundreds of companies and you'll see the coverage all over
1:23.8	our site for that but we're actually pre-recording an episode a very meta one and not in the
1:28.7	Facebook sense about the state of demo days it's kind of a conversation that's been around for a while
	...

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