AI Demos from Inception
If you were around 2005 in Mountain View, there was this unmistakable energy around everything that Paul Graham was doing. As a teen, I remember crashing one of the YC parties and seeing PG casually walk among developers - it was so refreshing. He was not there to stalk on the founders’ pitches - he was there to really get engaged with the community and be part of it.
PG is not around the valley anymore and neither is he doing the walks, but there is a new breed of founder-focused community builders in the valley. One in particular, Inception, has been making a lot of waves.
Inception Demo Days
A lot has happened in the valley since 2005. One major difference is that there are a lot more tech companies. More companies means that there is competition in every sector. More competition means it is not enough to just be a good hacker. Problems and opportunities have to be defined precisely. Precision often can lead to features (not ambitious companies), so this is where industry experience comes in handy.
From the start, Inception was very bullish on this notion of prior experience. Inception started as a venue for Inception’s own founders to kick off the launch of their company. John and Mike went on to raise a Seed round, but decided to keep the Inception concept going.
Nine cohorts later and Inception’s Demo days are thriving. Maybe presentations are not as polished as those at various pitch competitions around the valley, but considering that teams begin their pitch work a couple nights prior during the program’s weekend offsite, the pitches are quite good.
Take a look for yourself!
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About the Author
In my former life I was a Data Scientist. I dropped out of MiT just a semester short of completing my graduate degree to bootstrap my previous company. Having studied Computer Science, Statistics and Business, I eventually joined a small venture-backed company in Santa Cruz. That company’s name was Looker - today, a Google Cloud company.