Join the History of Demo Days
Join the History of Demo Days
This is a big week for investor demo days and showcases
As the next seven days have some of the best Demo Days (including Deep Tech Demo Day), I thought I would just give a thought piece on why Demo Days are such an amazing innovation in startup lore.
To define a Demo Day, it is when a group of founders with lots of different companies come together and present to a room full of investors for capital. This can be online or offline.
The idea of showcasing deals is historically a part of Venture Capital, dating back to the 1950s when it was more of a club, people would bring a few founders to a breakfast in order to present the opportunity to the numerous families and groups who were interested in these early stage deals.
When the market of Venture Capital institutionalized, and my grandfather talked about how the CEO of Goldman Sacks backed up the truck to Silicon Valley and dumped money into the ecosystem, people built walled gardens. Venture Capital became far less friendly with the early stages.
The only remaining element of sharing deals openly would have been in the pitch days, where groups of founders will pitch a few or one investor for a few hours on end, but the true power of Demo Days emerged when:
The cost of starting an internet company decreased by exponential amounts
Standards for investing in Startups began to form (Convertible notes, rights…)
There was a rise of the “Angel” investor in the early 2000/2010s (Investing in Facebook became cool)
These three things led to the event where we created a marketplace, rather than a one sided pitch system. A bazaar for startup companies. YCombinator is the defacto brand for the Demo Day platform and has inspired more (Including Boost VC’s Deep Tech Demo Day) to launch different systems to distribute the interest in startup companies. This has refreshed a collaborative mentality around early stage startup investing.
Demo Days were an incredibly easy way for new angel investors to generate deal flow, and pretty soon became THE place that some VCs and angels would go for all of their deals.
Demo days are as valuable as the companies selected. Which is why Boost VC evolved their platform to share the stage with nominated companies from other fantastic Deep Tech venture funds. Come join in the historical fun of Demo Days here!