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I bet we are all following the adventures of Paul Graham's Y Combinator lately. I found this blog entry on demoing for funding. Having done *tons* of demos during my time at Microsoft, speaking in front of small groups of 10 or so, up to a large room of 1000, I'd agree with pretty much everything here.
I'd add to this, for small groups, *Know your audience*. If you have a canned demo, ask yourself if it plays better to your non-technical mom than it does to highly experienced VCs & angels. If you can tailor the demo to positively stun and simultaneously answer the obvious questions, you are one step closer.
There is no excuse these days for not having the entire demo running from a single laptop. With virtualization, you could have two different machines bundled in one, database server and client, etc. Recent laptops can be stuffed with 2gigs (or more) of RAM which hopefully is enough. You would be surprised how little memory a Debian Linux instance running MySQL takes... Put it in a Xen VM and run the rest of your demo from Domain0. |
