2nd Inseaders Demo Day: “what’s in it for me, the entrepreneur, going forward?”
In the past few days we have been receiving some questions. For many people it is still not clear how to participate in a demo day and what participating in an Inseaders demo day can do and that is…well…perfectly normal, afterall there have been only 2 demo days so far, and both happened in the last two weeks. Uff! 😫
Say that you were enjoying your vacations in some exotic destination for the past weeks, you would have missed 100% of the opportunities to participate or to assist to a demo day, but no need to worry as the plans are that it becomes a quarterly event…
It is also fair to say, that at the moment, besides the potential and current participants, everyone, including the people organising it, are learning in the process, as the community community building and raising of awareness are also under way.
Having this taken into account, to some extent is yet to be determined the full potential of the things that may be achieved by participating in any of the demo days, going forward, but some things start to show.
Sorry Vaibhav, for the time being there is not a quarterly prize money 🏆, but by participating you can start to:
1. become visible to the community
To date there are around 1400 (this number keeps changing) of people signed-up to Inseaders platform, mostly alumni. These people have shown interest in the entrepreneurial aspects aspirations of the community and are updated with the news regarding demo days, entrepreneur stories and other things happening. In order to register your startup in the platform you don’t have to participate in the demo day, but for sure there will be increased exposure to the community if you are registered and participate in a demo day.
2. receive feedback from potential investors
If you apply to the demo day, and in case there are interested investors 🤞 you will be exposed to their feedback — this can be particularly helpful for early stage startups that sometimes have only discussed their ideas internaly and are missing an external perspective on the level of attractiveness of their products and services when it comes to funding.
3. practice your pitch skills
If nothing else, you can practice your skills at presenting your idea to such a diverse audience. There are ideas that one cannot help thinking would have a different destiny if presented differently.
That’s all fine, but what happened at the 2nd Demo Day?
If you are like me you had no specific expectations for the ideas to be presented at the second demo day — the first one had been varied enough not to allow any predicting.
But perhaps you had a guess based on the trendiest topics at the moment — artificial intelligence, virtual reality, sharing economy. If you had you were right. Some of the startups pitched their products and services in those areas, but there were some refreshing ones too.
Besides the specificity of the industry perhaps you were also wondering about the level of maturity of the startups and ideas that were present. As you can see on the schedule there are current students presenting their ideas so some were still taking shape, while others were already going on for some time.
Now I get it, but what are other venues to have this kind of experience with the Insead alumni community?
Inseaders is an alumni driven initiative, not driven by Insead, so specific plans to address this would have to be asked to the school. To date, to our knowledge, there are no other venues that offer the possibility to present at a demo day and to have access to a platform that connects alumni, investors and startups.
That was a good conversation. Feel free to initiate others!
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Also feel free to check the website at inseaders.vc . Any thoughts and questions also drop me a line at andreia@inseaders.vc
