Presentation last night at Seattle MIT Startup Demo 2007

Last night was one of those nerve wracking moments for yours truly — let me paint the picture.

TeachStreet was chosen to present at Startup Demo 2007, along with 6 other local startups, at an event hosted by MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest. We were excited about our first public demo to a larger crowd, and the team made a big push to get us ready — we were fired up! I tested the demo beforehand at our offices, and then to be extra safe, we checked the live demo at the location itself — all’s looking great, right? Wrong! When I walked up to the podium, the first 1-2 minutes went smoothly… I was on a role… feeling quite the speechmaster, actually. Then, I moved to the demo itself. Drum roll, please. Yes, as you can guess, the site wouldn’t load. Tech veterans will say “it isn’t a demo until something malfunctions”, but in most of those cases, it’s in a conference room with a few folks wh0 will happily accommodate a 5 minute intermission, to give you a chance to research and fix the problem. In this case, I had a 100+ person audience, not to mention the field of judges, including John Cook, from the Seattle PI (thanks for the nice TeachStreet article mention anyway, John!)

We did what we could — and were really excited by the enthusiasm from the crowd, despite our technical glitches — it always feels good to be reminded about the excitement around our idea/strategy.

In the end, Brent Lamphier from Athleon Sport took home the first prize, and it was well deserved — his presentation was really crisp, and his demo came off flawlessly!

Note to self, and other startup entrepreneurs — don’t set up your development website server on port :2001 — much smarter to use the normal :80 (when the wireless switched over on us, we got bumped to a wireless hub that blocked :2001). See… we learn something new every day!