Maya Ghosn 2011 Student Ambassador: Being an Intern at Demo Days

Maya Ghosn is a Sophomore at Stanford and was an InternMatch Student Ambassador during the Spring 2011 semester.  She represented InternMatch at 500 Startups Demo Days as InternMatch pitched to a crowd of investors and press.

On April 7^th, I went to my first-ever Demo Day.  I’ll be honest with you—I had absolutely no idea what to expect, but it turned out to be one of the most fun and rewarding days of my entire internship. It took place at the 500 Startups office in Mountain View.

Demo Day basically consisted of 22 startups from the 500 Startups incubator giving a 5-minute overview of their start-up to potential investors and press in the audience. Given that each start-up had so little time to give their pitch, you can imagine that they got very creative. Visual.ly used an amazing and breath-taking introductory video to capture the audience, while the Punch’d Co-founder tagged his start-up as a “hyper-local deals platform… in your pants” (See image 1), and Speakergram used the 500 Startups founder Dave McClure to send a powerful message. (See image 2)

After the pitches were over, everyone moved to another room to give investors and the press a chance to speak to the start-ups one-on-one. Each table consisted of a laptop, at least one member of that start-up, and a freebie (always a must!). With the start-ups excited to share their progress and talk more about what they do to investors and the press, the energy in the room was trulyunbelievable.

Wearing my InternMatch t-shirt and standing at the InternMatch table with a fellow intern from CalPoly, I nervously dreaded speaking to investors. The responsibility of representing InternMatch and making a lasting and correct impression on investors was honestly pretty tantalizing. But the second I started talking to investors, I immediately relaxed and appropriated my role as a representative of the start-up. As someone who had been working with InternMatch for a couple of months, I started to feel very attached to it, and really feel like part of the team, so I inevitably found myself working very hard to ensure that all of InternMatch’s resources and tools were communicated and clear to investors

Driving back from Demo Days that night was the first time that I realized just how amazing and enthralling the start-up world was, and just how lucky I was to be able to be part of it through my involvement with InternMatch.