Avocode at 500 Startups; Week #14: 3 months prep for 2 minutes pitch

Okay, last week was insane. I'm beginning to think that only in Sillicon Valley can a man go through so many things in one week.

Pitch

We kicked off the week with a dress rehearsal for Demo Day at the Computer History Museum. This place is just something else — from a Google self-driving car in the lobby to Steve Wozniak’s picture on the Wall of Fellows.

Vu practiced on the big stage in the main hall. And the rest of us? We ran around the museum. 🌪🤘🏼

The “D Day” finally came. The atmosphere is hard to describe, but it’s a heck of an experience to sit in a room full of people who manage the capital of X size of my home country GDP.

Avocode and other 41 companies from 500 Startups pitched in front of investors from USA, China, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain and more.

Because there were two tracks of our batch program — B2B and Beauty products, the theme of the Demo Day was called “Beauty and the Geek”.

Btw, Dave McClure had his 50th birthday.

Guess who took this picture of his cake…

You can have a look at our pitch here: 👇🏼

If you want to go through the Demo Day from Vu’s point of view, check out this article on our freshly launched blog Avocode Community.

After the presentations each company did it's best to stand out and show a product demo to all curious investors. My favorite “product demo” was this Montainer, which was placed outside the Computer History Museum with a crane. 👇🏼

Montainer sells affordable homes made from old containers. (Made in Montana)

Community

Wednesday was all about content. First we attended Graham Hunter's lecture about Building a Community for Growth at the 500 Startups Marketing Hell Week (Batch 18) in San Francisco.

Here are the slides.

Then we went out for lunch with Vlad and John from Webflow. I talked to John (ex-Head of Content at inVision and currently Director of Content Strategy at Webflow) about his best practices and he gave me feedback for our recently launched Avocode Community.

BTW, I am going to be interviewing John for our new blog next week, so if you have any questions that you would like me to ask him, shoot me an e-mail at community@avocode.com.

After the lunch we had like 20 minutes of free time, so we had a peak into Adobe HQ.

Feedback

On Thursday we shot probably the fastest video case study with Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of Shoto and sd2labs. Sachin gave us valuable feedback and tips for new features such as mentions in Notes — we shot his part of the video in a single shot without any cuts (if only all people would be such great actors).

You can look forward for the video in this category in a couple of weeks.

Mountain View

There is something magical about this place…

…you go for a bike and stumble upon NASA Research Labs or Googleplex…

… or you rent a car, go 40 minutes north and suddenly you are in San Francisco which has some of the most chill parks I've ever seen…

Aka: how we fit six people into a 5seats car and went to the Dolores park.

…plus you have such a wide variety of cuisines to choose from, so you can always find what you feel like…

Czech beer and a Schnitzel masked inside a bun.

Thanks

The past three months were leading to the Demo Day and that’s successfuly behind us now. By the time I’m writing this articles I have only ten days left till my departure. Since we’ve launched our new Avocode Community blog, from now on I have to redirect my attention to that. That means this is the last weekly article here.

Though I will be leaving this place soon, I’m sure I will never forget it. The summer of 2016 really changed my life and I know that this goes not just for me but also for all of my colleagues from 500 Startups.

I still have a draft of the last piece that I will finish that will sum up everything we’ve learned here. I’m looking to finish the copy on the plane back home.

Check this section of Avocode Community on 30th of August to read the final chapter of our journey.

I’d like to thank you my fellow readers. 🙏🏼 You're awesome.

Matt out. 🎤💥