Scenes from Demo Day
With only two minutes to pitch, the pressure was on last week as 42 startups and 500+ attendees gathered in San Francisco for a16z speedrun Demo Day.
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With only 48 hours to go before Demo Day, Liam Bolling had a big problem: investors weren't vibing with his pitch.
“The story wasn’t resonating,” says Bolling, cofounder of DeepPrediction.
So he and his team rebuilt their pitch deck from scratch. They had just two days to rework their story into something that Bolling could deliver on-stage to an audience of 500+ Demo Day attendees in the SFJAZZ theater.
Bolling, who says he’s “terrified” of public speaking, needed a way to build confidence.
His solution: practicing in virtual reality. Bolling snapped a panoramic photo from the stage and imported it into an Apple Vision Pro headset.
“What better way than to pretend I’m actually on a stage and get all the jitters out?" Bolling says. “I would record giving the pitch on stage in VR, play it back, critique myself, and repeat until each moment sounded exactly how I would want to hear it.”
Bolling kept practicing up until just moments before he went on stage. The extra practice paid off. He came across as confident and in-command of his pitch. “We’ve had 45+ meetings within 72 hours of Demo Day,” Bolling says, “and usually the meetings with investors started with ‘You did an incredible pitch, I needed to talk to you guys.’”
Now, DeepPrediction reports they’re on track to quickly close a funding round.
High Stakes in San Francisco
Last Tuesday was a16z speedrun’s Demo Day, the moment the class of SR004 has been building toward since the 12-week program kicked off in January.
For the participating founders, Demo Day is a chance to pitch their companies to an audience of hundreds. For the 500+ attendees, the event is a hyper-compressed barrage of polished pitches from some of the most fascinating startups working in tech and entertainment. It’s a high-stakes startup sample platter from the future.
Well before the doors opened at 9am, a line began to form around the block, as a mix of angels, VCs, and media attendees gathered outside of the venue at SFJAZZ.
Inside, founders like Ryan Benmalek of Talus Robotics grabbed breakfast and chatted while waiting to be called backstage.
Benmalek’s team is building robotic guide dogs for the blind. That’s a pitch that might sound fanciful, but Talus Robotics is dead-serious and passionate about solving this problem. Benmalek says that in prep for Demo Day, he spent days practicing his pitch wherever he went, “walking around SF, talking out loud like a crazy person.”
“I wanted everyone in the audience to feel what we’ve felt over the past three months,” Benmalek says, “after interviewing hundreds of blind people and testing with dozens of them.”
Once onstage, it’s easy to see why some would find presenting intimidating. With the lights dimmed, it was difficult to make out faces in the audience of the standing-room-only SFJAZZ theater.
But the founders were ready. One after another, in back-to-back two-minute presentations, the founders of 42 companies stepped on stage and delivered beautifully polished pitches for their vision.
Some, like Double Dusk’s Alexander Mistakidis and Mini Studio’s Youmna Chamcham, inspired the audience with visions for a new generation of entertainment.
Others gripped the audience with eye-opening first lines: “Cheap drones are the number one cause of losses in modern combat,” began the pitch from Mara’s Daniel Kofman, who is building anti-drone defense technology that leverages games tech.
“It was an incredible feeling to walk off a stage and see dozens of inbound meeting requests in seconds,” said Kofman.
There were plenty of lighthearted moments as well.
Albert Wang of Coverd delivered a standup-comedy-style pitch that began with an ode to “degens” and concluded with him whipping out a money gun and spraying dollar bills all over the stage (a move he pre-cleared with our team, who ended up performing cleanup duty after it turned out that the bills were stickier than anticipated).
During my one minute pitch on the first day of Speedrun, I was very robotic. People gave me the feedback that I didn't look like myself because I have a natural flow and charisma that didn't shine through.
After that, I knew that I had to improve. So I got three amazing pitch coaches and following their guidance I steadily improved. There are techniques from different fields that can be used for pitching such as singing, acting, and improv. It was super useful to do mindset, breathing, and storytelling exercises. One month later, at Progress Day, the feedback I got from other founders was that I had improved the most.
—Nuno Leiria, Founder & CEO of Nilo Technologies
After the pitches concluded, the room broke for lunch while staffers worked to hastily convert the SFJAZZ floorspace into an open demo area, with stations reserved for each of the pitching teams.
With attendees flooding in to get face-time with founders, this class of a16z speedrun officially wrapped up a journey that began months earlier.
But now the real work begins. Some, like Double Dusk’s Alexander Mistakidis, are fundraising. “Our next move is selecting which partners we'd like to work with and getting back to building something players love,” he says.
As always, it’s time to build.
💡 More Big Ideas
📺 Over on the new a16z speedrun YouTube channel, we’re sharing in-depth talks that were previously only available to speedrun founders. The latest: Carta CEO Henry Ward on Avoiding Costly Mistakes, Hiring Right, and Product Market Fit
🥡 Andrew Chen’s interview with DoorDash founder Tony Xu revealed that DoorDash's v1 was 8 PDF menus on a static HTML website.
🌶️ a16z speedrun’s resident spicy poster Robin Guo kicked off a debate by threatening to move to SF. In his words, “the founders are just better.”
💼 There are currently over 400 open jobs listings across our portfolios. Join our talent network for more opportunities. If we see a fit for you, we'll intro you to relevant founders in the portfolio.
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What a great story about Liam Bolling! Thank you for sharing it.
Hi I’d love a read as I dive into the ethics of tech through the lens of Japanese animation
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidfoye/p/akira-and-the-ethics-of-technological?r=4g90ob&utm_medium=ios