I had actually never checked out any YC demo day presentations, so this post pushed me to do so. I watched about a dozen of them from the latest batches and I must say I did feel that they were very underwhelming.
Sure, I understand that my expectations of how a company looks so early on might be skewed and they have only about 3 minutes, but all the speeches were so templated (stressing ridiculously overhyped market values etc.) that I thought they were really uninspiring. Might be the fault of the VCs who are just looking to randomly jump on the next potentially successful ship endorsed by YC, but I honestly got tired of hearing about the next app that will change the world of X within 10 minutes.
As you mentioned, some of these products have been genuinely amazing and winning lottery tickets that on average bring huge profits to YC, so we should probably look at it more pragmatically rather than expecting them to make the future better.
Sure, I understand that my expectations of how a company looks so early on might be skewed and they have only about 3 minutes, but all the speeches were so templated (stressing ridiculously overhyped market values etc.) that I thought they were really uninspiring. Might be the fault of the VCs who are just looking to randomly jump on the next potentially successful ship endorsed by YC, but I honestly got tired of hearing about the next app that will change the world of X within 10 minutes.
As you mentioned, some of these products have been genuinely amazing and winning lottery tickets that on average bring huge profits to YC, so we should probably look at it more pragmatically rather than expecting them to make the future better.