As promised, startup accelerator Y Combinator’s imminent Demo Day shall be taking place in person. In truth, YC appears to have kicked off the IRL return of Demo Day on the finish of the lengthy Thanksgiving weekend, with an in-person Alumni Demo Day on Sunday for the Fall 2024 class of startups.
Squad founder (and later Twitter and Meta product supervisor) Esther Crawford praised the “high energy” of getting to listen to 93 startups pitch in-person, whereas Avni Patel Thompson, founder and CEO of Milo, described it as “a dress rehearsal for the founders but also a beautiful pay-it-forward for alums to come back and support the current batch.”
The “dress rehearsal” is presumably for the primary Demo Day, the place the founders pitch to an viewers of traders and press. That Demo Day is scheduled for later this week, on Wednesday, December 4.
Virtual Demo Days have been a lingering artifact of the change to distant through the pandemic; at YC’s September Demo Day, CEO Garry Tan stated these displays could be the final ones held fully on-line, “knock on wood.”
Now YC describes Demo Day as “back to being in-person,” with an invite-only viewers of round 1,500 — and in case you can’t make it to San Francisco, you’ll need to make do with a Demo Day web site “which has information on the companies that presented.”