As promised, startup accelerator Y Combinator’s imminent Demo Day will be happening in person. In fact, YC seems to have kicked off the IRL return of Demo Day at the end of the long 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 manager) Esther Crawford praised the “high energy” of getting to hear 93 startups pitch in-person, while 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 main Demo Day, where the founders pitch to an audience of investors and press. That Demo Day is scheduled for later this week, on Wednesday, December 4.
Virtual Demo Days were a lingering artifact of the switch to remote during the pandemic; at YC’s September Demo Day, CEO Garry Tan said those presentations would be the last ones held entirely online, “knock on wood.”
Now YC describes Demo Day as “back to being in-person,” with an invite-only audience of around 1,500 — and if you can’t make it to San Francisco, you’ll have to make do with a Demo Day website “which has information on the companies that presented.”