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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

I was somewhat surprised by the lack of actual, you know, demos and the emphasis on streamlined slide shows. Is that common now? It's been a while since I pitched something...

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Presentations were so short this cycle that there was no time for demos.

Since everyone asks how we decide how long presentations should be, I'll just answer that now. People can sit for about 55 minutes. Two sessions = 110 minutes. 43 startups presenting means slots are at most 110/43 minutes.

The solution will be to move to 3 sessions. That was inevitable anyway, as the number of startups per cycle increases. It will make DDay as a whole longer, but I think investors will be ok with that, because it is still much more efficient for them than meeting the startups individually.

Any thought of adding follow-up longer form presentations on a later day for doing actual demos for interested investors and startups, maybe in groups of five to ten startups at a time?

Interesting idea, but I don't think there would be time. When investors see startups they like at DDay, they know they have to act fast, because 350 other investors just saw them too. So investors interested in a startup are usually meeting with them in the next couple days.

That's interesting too - there's now no time in the YC program for pitching actual demos to investors, at least in inital group pitch format.

Just curious...are investors allowed to sit in on all of the sessions or are there different investors for each session?

There are three Demo Day events, each composed of two identical sessions. The only reason we have multiple events is that we don't have enough room for all the investors at once. Though it does have the additional benefit that if someone screws up their presentation, they get other chances.

Too expensive to rent an auditorium, or too impersonal? Or something like not wanting to take away the founders' home field advantage?

You can't transform an auditorium into a reception in place, which is what we do to the orange room at YC after the presentations. After the last talk the founders pour in and we scurry about folding up all the chairs, and about 3-4 minutes later the room looks like a (big, loud) cocktail party instead of an auditorium.

Most hotel conference rooms/ballrooms are set up with portable chairs and I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing there, but something seems ineffably worse about that scenario to me. Maybe that with everyone presenting at once to all of the investors, there will end up being fewer total conversations between founders and investors.

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