I had the pleasure of attending the 500 Startups Demo Day for Batch 11 yesterday.1 I had a great time. I’m humbled by the energy, effort, and enthusiasm. Wow.

Here are my completely biased2, ungrammatical 1-minute summaries of each of them. I am absolutely sure that there are errors, omissions, terrible mischaracterizations, and me-being-just-plain-clueless. The list below is not much more than a quick exercise to scribble down what my uninitiated ears hear and brain remembered after a day or two.

I also scribbled down the first question that came to mind as wrote the summary. That is not a criticism of any presentation at all. To prompt questions is a goal for these sessions. It’s just what came to mind in recalling the pitch.

Starting a company is a frightening, maddening, exhilarating, worthy endeavor. If you’re reading this from one of the companies, y’all are awesome.3 Let me know if I totally missed something, want to answer the question, or heck if you just want to grab coffee.

I have to note that the mechanics of the presentations were impressively smooth. Thirty pitches in roughly 4 hours is not easy to do. Thank you for putting together a great demo day!

In the order they appeared:

Name & Angelist My takeaway One Question Notes
HeadOut Last-minute (<24h) entertainment and event tickets. Are you more able to charge a premium for hard to get tickets, or negotiate a vendor discount, to fill expiring inventory? fka Tourlandish
StudyPool Paid tutorial help for problem sets / homework. How do you manage quality and correctness? The examples shown were pretty specific.  
AppZen Automated AI business expense report fraud detection with easy ingest UX. Um, can I beta that?  
CoinPip Lower cost international money transfer using bitcoin as exchange. What’s it cost to hedge against fiat/bitcoin exchange flux during the 1-day transaction period?  
PlotBox Management SaaS for cemeteries with a drone mapping service. Cemeteries are very long-lived businesses if funded right. How does a SaaS business fit with that?  
Italist eCommerce enablement of and marketing for fragmented high-end Italian fashion/design markets. How do you handle the return policy?  
Techpear Algorithmic hiring. Does the system consider only the resume? Or is there more testing & interviewing?  
Tappur Clothing-embedded wearable controllers. Is the final product drumpants or OEM/licenses for the controllers?  
eTobb Retail telemedicine in the Middle East. How can this translate across language, culture, regulatory, & medical practice borders?  
Chouxbox Management SaaS for restaurants. Can this be easily customized for franchises?  
HeTexted Mobile crowdsourced relationship advice. Could advisors make a living or carve out a brand doing this?  
CloudAcademy Training and certification for Cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, etc.) Why don’t traditional tech training services handle cloud topics?  
Vaivolta Management / bidding SaaS for construction equipment. Brazil-focused. What’s the smallest piece of equipment that could be managed economically?  
Slidebean A super-wizard for building presentation slides. Does it run on iOS Safari? How far out to a native app?  
Doughbies Fresh baked cookies-as-a-service. What’s the delivery range for 20-min cookies in SF, for example? The cookie was a nice touch.

This is the midway point. Tomorrow, I’ll finish up with the rest of companies below.

Name & Angelist My takeaway One Question Notes
Strappy Gay men segment-focused Trunk Club.    
Cleanify Cleaning service aggregator / marketplace.    
ProSky Recruiting platform disguised as (pre?)Employment / job training.    
Connected2.me Omnichannel (ie includes desktop) secure messaging.    
Blinq Android (currently) in-app messaging just-in-time social context delivery.    
Socialight Social media analytics.    
Funnelly eCommerce exhaust data to optimize Facebook ads.    
Catnip Snackable, visual content for Millenials. Machine curated Pintrest meets mobile.    
Coinding Bitcoin enablement of game developers and gaming market.    
Mountary White glove picture framing and matting-as-a-service.    
PayKind Fine-grained donation payment, redemption, and analytics. Africa focused.    
99games Used video game marketplace.    
Elwafeyat Middle Eastern Obituary collaborative authoring and broadcast SaaS.    
Astroprint Push-button network-based and cloud-stored 3D printer control system.    
NativeTap Real Android phone & watch rental for test and debug. Network-provisioned and accessed.    

UPDATE: Touched up intro paragraphs for clarity. Moved last paragraph up. Elwafeyat spelling corrected. Added link to second set of companies.

  1. Thank you to Tyler Freeman at Tappur for the invite. ↩

  2. Too many to list. Here’s a smattering: +Enterprise Software, +3D, +Crypto, +Developers, +Wearables, +Audacious ↩

  3. Ok, even if you’re not, you’re awesome, too. ↩