To me, demo days feel like they are mostly PR events for the accelerator. It is a very easy way for an accelerator to get people to notice it, since it is one of the few events an accelerator is usually hosting, where they have significant presence and they can attract a lot of reports with the startups. Apart from that, it is very hard, especially for smaller accelerators, to even be mentioned in an article of one of the startups they funded.

You can replicate a lot of the value by getting a group of serious founders together and having them spend a day or half a day pitching to each other, with feedback. If you can get a mentor experienced with the process to give you feedback, even better.

While I would not take away from the obvious value of DEMO and similar launch conferences, early stage start-ups need to think long and hard whether they are even ready to launch. In lean start-up parlance, most early stage start-ups are still in Customer Discovery and Validation. If you have not locked down what your market type is, what problem you are solving and what customers would buy from you, making a big splash could be a very costly mistake. I have seen too many start-ups go to these events and come away poorer without any results to show for it.

All that being said, like with many decisions, it is the execution that counts. You were going for free, so you had a huge opportunity to make the most of the time. To simply expect to show up however and get attention is naive. The press want interesting stories and you are competing with 50 other companies, all vying for attention. You could have built up interest in numerous ways by being proactive and creative to build up interest. For example, you could have pulled together a Social Media SWAT team of friends/family/business partners to tweet, Like, and push your story out there. Instead, you simply showed up, which is kind of like building a web app and simply expecting people to visit.

As with anything, it was a learning experience, but I would not use this experience to color your views on conferences. You just need to understand how best to utilize these tools to your advantage.

From politics to selecting an air conditioning contractor and beyond, presentation and engagement matter a lot. It's not that people are stupid or superficial, these things (and others) create impressions and confidence. And, in some cases, they are crucial to the success of the venture.

When I first launched into the world as an entrepreneur, decades ago, I was too much of an engineer. One key element that was missing is I sucked at selling. You can engineer an amazing product but, contrary to the popular saying, people won't beat a path to your door unless you are good at selling it. The history of business is paved with the carcasses of great products that never got off the ground because the people involved couldn't sell them.

In my case I recognized this from the very start and actively sought help in the area where I was most deficient. The first few months after we started to sell our hardware product were terrible. I'd mess-up presentation after presentation. Yet, with constant coaching I eventually figured it out. Within about eight months or so I was so comfortable selling that I could actually sell a product without saying a single word about it during a demo.

These presentations to potential investors have a far greater purpose than simple product demos. They serve to communicate to the audience a range of information about the entrepreneur. Important data points. One of them being whether or not the person can actually sell what they are making. If you can't sell and are going to hire someone to do so, you might be better off having them do the presentation. Folks who understand selling can sell anything, including a startup looking for funding.

To paraphrase an observation made decades ago by Smokey Yunick, a famed race car designer:

"When all the smoke and bullshit clears out you have to sell the damn thing".

If the founder is indeed going to be in a position of standing up to a group of potential customers and selling something to them, whether it's a car or an expensive software package, then I can see the importance of such a presentation.

If, however, the sales takes place in a store, on a website, or in a catalog, then a different set of skills are needed--developing sales funnels, setting up distribution partnerships, converting online visitors, and writing stellar marketing copy. Yet I have never seen a demo day or investor pitch session that focuses on those skills, even though they will have a huge impact on the success or failure of many types of ventures.

If you can't sell and are going to hire someone to do so, you might be better off having them do the presentation.

That makes sense. Serious question, though: but do demo day organizers encourage it? How would investors or audiences react?

Folks who understand selling can sell anything, including a startup looking for funding.

I know this is true, yet I find this disappointing. It means that great salespeople can sell a turkey, which not only hurts investors but takes money away from more capable enterprises.

Also, it's not a subtle effect at all, particularly now that demo day is split up into batches with similar companies grouped together. If you're presenting on the same day as some company close to your space that has raised millions, it looks bad. Investors routinely ask who else has invested in your company. If company X has a long list of name investors and you don't, investors want to put their money in company X. It's a downside of the dynamics of the feeding frenzy created by demo day -- investors have little to go on, so they make a big deal out of herd signaling.

Obviously, this doesn't matter for the hottest deals, but most companies in a batch aren't hot deals, and the hot deals don't need demo day in the first place.

- reassuring the people that pay the bill

- get PR feedback

- give a concrete objective with a deadline to the team

But like a lot of things, it's not useful for what most people think it's useful.

Does demo day work for the audience?

Notably, the article doesn't call for others to abandon Demo Days. They're just giving a case study on their logic and their startups.

At events like TC Disrupt, where startups demo in booths, few (perhaps no) investors ask for demos from all of them. The startups have posters and investors decide based on those which to approach and talk to further. In effect YC Demo Day presentations are those posters.

Maybe it's just the most efficient form of presenting? I feel like the benefits at that stage really outweigh the risks.

(3) here seems to be the most important from my experience - and I'd reword it: demo your product through the lens of business value. Is this going to reduce toil letting engineers further up the stack move faster? Tighten feedback loops? Reduce pager fatigue? Reduce head count growth as the business grows?

My demos almost always have extra engineering work dedicated to the demo, visual aids, and a story that shows the evolution of the problem domain: how did we find ourselves working on this and what happens to the business if nobody solves this problem space?

Demos of obscure backend tech are most powerful if you can root them in language directors, VPs, and execs hear from the tech org on a regular basis. Attaching your work to the reasons they hear for things taking too long, costing so much, or causing downtime will win you friends and get you valuable feedback on aligning/calibrating your work to business need.

If you can line up a large number of them (through having worked in the Bay Area a lot, through your past employers), then you have a huge leg up that makes Demo Day less useful