Demo day
An event where a batch of startups (often from an accelerator) pitch to a room of investors and operators. High signal density per room - and one of the highest-stakes networking surfaces a founder will hit all year.
Demo day is the showcase event for an accelerator batch (Y Combinator, Techstars, Sequoia Arc, and many others). Founders pitch their company for 2-3 minutes in front of a few hundred investors. After the pitches, the room turns into one of the highest-leverage networking environments of the year.
The investor side of a demo day is unusually dense - GPs, scouts, angels, and analysts attend almost universally. The founder side is also unusually self-selected: only the batch and a handful of guests get in. This makes demo days one of the few events where the "who else is in the room" question has high-confidence, high-density answers.
The trap of demo day is that everyone fixates on the pitch and underprepares for the after-pitch room. Most batches will tell you the value of the pitch is two orders of magnitude less than the value of the follow-up conversations - which means the playbook of researching attendees before you arrive matters more here than at any other event.
Related terms
- Warm intro - An introduction made by someone you already know. At events, the "warm" can come from physical proximity: you ...
- ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) - A short description of the type of person, account, or context you are trying to find. In B2B sales it lives in a CRM. A...
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