I had the good fortune of attending the TechStars Seattle demo day last week, and thought it might be interesting to compare it to my own AngelPad demo day in San Francisco this spring. First - congratulations to all the teams! It's a really strong batch of companies with some great pitches.

Quick backstory - my cofounder Julius and I took our own startup Shopobot through the AngelPad accelerator in SF this year. That was incredibly helpful to us - with their mentorship we had a super successful launch and quickly raised a seed round. The pivotal moment in that process was the "demo day", where we got to give a highly polished pitch to a room full of investors, and that marked the kickoff to our fundraising.

A few months later, we decided to move our startup from SF to Seattle because of some weird politics in California. (this is a whole other story)

We ended up renting office space in the TechStars / Founders Coop building in SLU Seattle, and so we found ourselves sitting among 10 TechStars companies going through an accelerator just like we'd done a few months earlier.  We got to know these companies over the last few months, and I got to sit in on their pitches last week. I wasn't involved in the actual TechStars program, so to be fair I'm only comparing the demo day experiences here..

DEMO DAY SHOWDOWN

Seattle	San Francisco
Venue
Showbox Sodo nightclub - a huge space with a stage. Approx 500 people attended the demo, mostly made up of investors / press / and some friends & family. Guests like me were segregated up in the bar area, so I couldn’t mingle with investors & press (suppose that's fair).	The AngelPad office in Soma. We demoed in the same space where we worked - a much smaller venue that required a very limited invitation list. We ended up having a morning and afternoon session so we could pitch to more investors (not sure how many exactly, maybe 150-200 total).
Introductions
Andy Sack who runs TechStars hosted the overall event, but for the actual pitches each team was introduced by a different person - generally someone who was already an investor. This was fantastic, because it gave social proof from someone who was willing to get up and pump the company and briefly explain why they're backing a winner. Then the presentor giving the pitch would come up on stage while their song played.  ("eye of the tiger.."  :)	Thomas Korte who leads AngelPad was our MC and host. We also had a single team member presenting, but our entire team was "on stage" with us during the pitch. The other teams were backstage, so we didn't actually get to watch each other’s pitches - but we'd seen them all a million times over the previous weeks as we helped each other refine them.
The pitch
Pitches were around 7 minutes each, which was a lot of time and allowed them to tell a pretty deep story about their background, product, market, traction. Basic format was a slide deck projected on a huge screen. Some of the teams' products are based on slick UI, and they had appropriatly slick slides.	Pitches were 2 minutes each. Yup. It took weeks of prep to polish our story down to two minutes, with the goal being to pique the investors' interest to get a meeting, and then give a deeper pitch in person. Every word and pause was deliberate.
Talking $$$
Every team announced how much they were raising, and how much they'd raised so far. I won't put numbers here, but every team had what I consider a significant start to their round, or were already profitable. All the teams had at least some room left in their round.	We were generally advised to hold off fundraising until demo day, since once fundraising begins it can snowball and become the only thing you can focus on. There was also some tension with a previous class where a company completely finished their round before demo day. Even those of us who already had commitments were quiet about them during the demo.
Audience
A lot of the messaging during the introductions was around promoting the idea of entrepreneurship, and the excitement and prestige of investing and supporting the Seattle tech scene. I don’t know the exact makeup of the audience, but that seems tailored more to an Angel investor audience.	Our audience was made up of Silicon Valley VCs, and some very active Angels. I don't remember any messaging around selling the dream of investing in startups, since that's basically those folks’ day job.
Networking
Guests like me were kicked out after the demos, and the companies stayed to meet with investors and have a dinner and then a party.  It sounded like a good chance to talk and get to know some of the investors.	Intense power mingling! Goal for every team member was to split up and get as many intros and meetings as possible. It was all very efficient - the short pitch gave investors just enough to get interested, so they'd have to commit to a meeting if they wanted to learn more. Then we repeated the entire thing in the afternoon for a different batch of investors. In that one day were able to book a lot of meetings, and that was the official beginning of our fundraising push.

I learned a lot about this batch of TechStars companies from their pitches and I was impressed. There are some very big businesses possible here, and a lot of impressive progress and demos. Seattle obviously doesn't have the same size of startup scene as San Francisco (nowhere does), but the quality I saw was very high.  I would say Seattle seems like a great place to be an Angel investor or VC.

Congrats to the companies that demo'd!

likebright.com  beamitmobile.com  blueboxnow.com  everymove.com  flexminder.com  

gochime.com  grouptalent.com  romotive.com  fireplace.rs  vizify.com

And if you want to see the suprising truth about how often stores change their prices, check out our startup Shopobot!

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