On July 8th, East Bay Hardware Startup meetup held another meetup at Impact Hub Oakland. Around 40 people came to the event to listen to our speaker, Professor Naeem Zafar from UC Berkeley. Meetup was divided into 3 sessions: networking, presentation and demo pitching.
Zafar covered the basics of how and what people should pitch to VCs. We heard gems like: “Use your pauses (to attract attention and stress the topic you are demonstrating)”, ”Investors only pay attention to 2 slides in your presentation: slide zero, and your financial projection. ” (slide zero is your intro to your company), and “In a 30 second elevator pitch, you need to explain 2 things: what is the problem, and who has this problem?”.
This demo and pitch session was a slightly different format than in the past. Besides fascinating demos, Zafar also coached brave members of our audience on how to pitch. With his feedback, in just the second round every one of the presenters were speaking more clearly and to the point. There were all types of products being pitched, like a testing company which can reduce testing-use antibiotics by 80%, a company that somehow automates construction work, a gadget that locks your devices, and all other cool products.
If you missed the presentation or are interested in more information, we will be posting a video of the presentation, and we will send out Naeem’s slides. Please keep an eye out for it!
Thank you, Impact Hub Oakland for hosting us and Solid Con for providing food and giveaways!
Impact Hub Oakland is a co-working & events space for a global community of professionals taking action to drive positive social and environmental change.
The O’Reilly Solid Conference is where the new multi-disciplinary community forming around the convergence of software and hardware—engineers, researchers, roboticists, artists, developers, designers, founders of startups, and innovators—will gather to explore what lies ahead as software increasingly interacts with the physical world.
Each month, the East Bay Hardware Startup Meetup puts on these events to allow hardware entrepreneurs to network, make valuable connections and hear a hardware industry expert speak about an interesting topic or problem that hardware startups might have.
