What remote YC demo day looked like

By Kam Leung

YC Summer 2020 was the first fully remote batch. The demo day format was a 1 minute pitch in semi alphabetical order over Zoom. Once the order was set we all memorized the 10-15 people going before us and got ready to present virtually.

There was over 1,000 investors at the presentation with most of the top firms being represented. To look our best and have nothing distract the presentation we got 3 pieces of advice: have a clean real background (virtual background can be glitchy), camera aiming down slightly (optimal selfie angle) and somewhere with good lighting.

So I found the only cleanish wall in my apartment and made a little mini tower of Sauron. I took the photo and shared it with the YC Slack channel.

This prompted everyone to start sharing their work stations and their demo day towers.

YC S20 batch

"Ironing board desk ftw" Ali Jiwani (Rally Video)

"CLRS is surprisingly useful" Colin Chartier (Layer CI)

"@Colin I see your four and raise you seven." Siddhartha Gorantla (Cradle)

Ben Klenk (Hotplate)

Simarpreet Sign (SockSoho)

"Stuck on daddy duty for a little bit before the presentation" Nik Kotov (Frontline)

"Going for the old school mood lighting 🕯️" Hamzah Chaudhary (Hubble)

Thiago Monteiro (Gitduck)

Kenton Jarvie (Oco Meals)

Joshua Wong (Hypotenuse)

"Vacant WeWork ftw" Josh Jensen (Inspectify)

"The Roboflow Ranch in Des Moines, Iowa." Joseph Nelson (Roboflow)

"Vacant wework in London #2" Nicolas Hourcard (QuestDB)

Nunzio Martinello (Akiflow)

Tanmaya Jain (Amber by inFeedo)

Nitthin Chandran (MedPiper Technologies)

Uday Sigh (Epihub)

"Using my iPhone as my webcam." Masud Hossain (Queue)

Lucas (Open Unit)

"Hackstation" Taylor Cooney (Open Unit)

James Ding (DraftWise)

"snacks to stay energized for the whole day 🐟" Jason Cui (Jemi)

Ustin Zarubin (Batch)

Akash Raju (Glimpse)

David Villarreal (Parrot Software)

YC Team

Michael Seibel (YC)

Harj Taggar (YC)

Kat Manalac (YC)

Special thanks to everyone who let me use their photos of their home and office. ❤️

It was quite endearing to watch our batchmates pitch their "multi-billion dollar market opportunities" from their kitchen tables. I hope that someday, when one of these companies owns an entire block of office space in Manhattan or San Francisco, they can look back fondly to the time they pitched their seed funding in a dimly lit hallway on a pile of cardboard boxes.

Posted on December 8, 2020

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