Lessons from Y Combinator's demo day

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a 17-hour marathon through nearly 200 startup pitches, the Equity team was fired up to get back on Twitter and chat through some early trends and favorites from the first day of Y Combinator's demo party. We'll be back on the air tomorrow, so make sure you're following the show on Twitter so you don't miss out. What did Natasha and Alex chat about? The following: First Impressions: We started by going through top-line numbers, geographic breakdown, and how the accelerator is doing when it comes to the representation of diverse founders. The last bit had a tiny bit of progress, but diversity continues to be an issue in YC's batches - even as cohort size grows. We also chatted about what startups pitching can work on: like better mics, which are cheap and good. Our early favorites: Metaphor, Lumify, Alex's favorite duo Indian real estate plays, Akudo, Reframe, and Playhouse. And some hmmm moments, including our thoughts on Writesonic, which Natasha has a potentially paranoid theory on. TechCrunch has extensive coverage of the day on the site, so there's lots to dig into if you are in the mood. More tomorrow! 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 welcome back to Equity Tech Wrenchis Venture Capital Focus Podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind
0:15.3	the headlines.
0:16.3	Today we are live here on a Twitter space to talk about all things YC, demo day, summer 21 batch day
0:22.3	one, which means that Natasha and I just demo day one
0:23.0	which means that Natasha and I just spent gosh what four or five hours I think yeah
0:27.8	listening to several hundred startup pitches it was a lot but Natasha please say hello to the people and tell them how you're feeling.
0:33.6	Hi, hi everyone. Thanks for joining us. I already see some of my favorites in the Twitter spaces.
0:38.1	Yeah, as Alex mentioned, we just spent the past few hours looking through some of the
0:41.7	half of the companies, half of the nearly 400 YC companies in this batch,
0:45.8	which is always fun to compare and contrast my only in-person
0:49.3	YC demo day, which was a year and a half ago, I think like a pure building and it's so different
0:56.0	doing it from the comfort of my living room but I think I like it.
0:59.6	My favorite example of how YC is better in the digital environment than it was in the real
1:04.4	person environment is my first ever YC demo day I it was down in like the
1:08.3	Computer Science Museum down in South Bay and I I went and Ryan Lawler was at DC at the time and he didn't like invite me back to the next one because he said I didn't look like I had any fun because I just sat in a corner and like it's very overwhelming if you're an introvert
1:25.0	because they packed everyone into this one room and like you didn't have space and the
1:29.2	Wi-Fi was weird. Anyways it's better to do, and we just saw several hundred companies present.
1:33.7	Natasha, though, before we get into specifics about companies, give me a barrage of stats.
1:39.4	Yes, 100%. So we got the background on this fourth remote demo day. It's their third fully
1:46.8	remote batch for YC and they give us some background on what YC is
1:51.5	accomplished since their last demo day. So that 16 YC exits, about 40 companies that have gone through
1:56.9	YC have been worth more than a billion dollars and 150 YC companies are worth more than 100 million.
	...

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