SAN FRANCISCO — As soon as Anastasia Prosina finishes pitching her startup’s chatbot for astronauts, a judge points out that its branding doesn’t inspire trust.
“I can’t help but notice that you named your AI ‘Tom,’” says Bill Heil, one of the judges. “Tom is the character in David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity,’ who’s an astronaut who dies in space.”
“Ground control to Major Tom,” Prosina, the 29-year-old founder of Stellar Amenities, sings mournfully to an audience of about 100 people on a Saturday night in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Welcome to the “Snark Tank,” where startup founders like Prosina pitch their companies and comedians make them laugh out loud. Beyond the laughs, there’s a serious side to the evening. Most startups fail, so it’s important to identify and fix problems early, say the panelists and their startup founder victims. And yet, getting brutally honest feedback can be surprisingly difficult in Silicon Valley.
The San Francisco Bay Area is the nation’s capital of startup investing—and every deal starts with a pitch like the ones presented on “Snark Tank.” In the second quarter of 2024 alone, $18.7 billion in venture capital was invested in startups in the region, according to data firm PitchBook, compared with $16.5 billion in the New York area and $2.5 billion in the Los Angeles area.
Despite the influx of money, many startups fail. “What people never talk about is that Silicon Valley is Death Valley,” Paul Jurcys, 40, a Snark Tank regular and startup founder himself, said after the show. “A lot of founders come here and realize their product has already been built or their idea doesn’t make sense — or they don’t have a competitive advantage.”
In addition to facing ridicule, founders brave enough to pitch their projects on “Snark Tank” get coaching on the basics, like the importance of making eye contact and holding the microphone close to their mouth. And they’re asked about the big questions, like: What problem are you trying to solve? How big is the potential market for this product? And, uh, what exactly does your startup do?
The vibe of the show is like a comedy show crossed with a tech industry networking event. Attendees, who can ask the founders questions after the comedians have had some fun, wear Patagonia sportswear and Wharton Business School lanyards. One audience member wore a monogrammed jacket proclaiming “IDEA to IPO.”
The event was conceived by Elizabeth Swaney, a 39-year-old former scout and Olympic skier turned Starbucks barista and comedian.
Swaney said she wants to make tech more accessible to the average person in hopes of making the industry more inclusive. She finds other tech events where founders pitch their companies in earnest to potential investors are “informative, but they’re often dry, monotonous events that don’t capture people’s attention,” Swaney said. in an interview. She now frequently hosts shows in Los Angeles and New York, in addition to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Swaney’s golden rule for wooing startup founders is to give them a real comments about their business — and leave out their clothes or appearance. She admits to making an exception for the laundry startup founder who gave his presentation wearing a visibly wrinkled outfit.
Venture capitalist and private equity investor AJ Gandhi said the show succeeds by turning something “super boring” into entertainment. “The only thing that’s fun about Silicon Valley is making fun of Silicon Valley,” he said.
Companies exhibiting at last month’s show included BioSieve, which is working on AI software to identify drug candidates for biotech companies; PigPug, creator of a brainwave headset to help children control symptoms of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; and Khoda.AI, an AI therapy app.
The panel bombarded them with questions and provocations such as: Your drug discovery slides are so vague that they make a horoscope seem more specific. What would happen in Silicon Valley if autism and ADHD were eradicated? And: Let’s be honest, did this pitch deck take you more than 20 minutes to put together?
Even the praise was delivered with a personal touch. “How come you prepared slides and you rehearsed them and it… was coherent and a very good use of everyone’s time, why?”” Heil asked Doga Makiura, founder of Degas, a microfinance platform for farmers around the world. The audience was delighted.
Rebecca Hardberger, a 45-year-old human resources professional, was less shocked by the jokes than by the business model of a founder who pitched Applaz, a social network that lets people Women are posting content from their phone’s notes app. “I see how bad Slacks is, I can only imagine open-source notes,” said Hardberger, who keeps a private tally of all the times her husband is hypocritical, which she doesn’t intend to make public.
Constance Castillo, founder of Applaz, said she doesn’t let such “fearful reactions” deter her. “We want sharing notes to be a way to be yourself,” she said in an interview, adding that her platform allows users to post anonymously.
Several founders said in interviews that after facing criticism from the panel of investors and comedians, they revised their pitch decks. Ahmad Reza Cheraghi, founder of Khoda.AI, said he was rethink the direction of his business based on the feedback he received that night.
But it was Prosina’s Stellar Amenities that attracted the most attention, partly because of the dramatic ending to its pitch.
As she finishes her presentation, a large image of Hal 9000, the destructive AI from the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” appears on the floor-to-ceiling projector screen.
This ominous reference prompts an audience member to ask a question that is becoming increasingly common as more AI products appear to be modeled on Hollywood’s Dystopian Plots: Haven’t you seen the end of this movie? Prosina swears she’s not developing an AI that would turn evil. “We’re working on Hal 9000, but on a good AI,” she says. “An AI that actually helps.”
Prosina, who has tried her hand at stand-up comedy, She said she found the event cathartic — a break from the image of a serious founder who has all the answers.
“I knew if I did a really bad job, I could make a joke out of it,” she said. But she also received feedback that led her to update her slides to clarify the market share she hoped to capture and the potential value of her startup.
However, she continues to call her space chatbot Tom. “I’m not changing the name. I have enough confidence in the name,” Prosina said when the Post met her. weeks after the event. And at least one audience member felt comfortable with the brand: After the event, Prosina was approached by someone who offered her a $50,000 angel investment.
As for Swaney, she’s turning “Snark Tank” into more than just a night of entertainment. She’s filed the paperwork to form her own startup to run the show, Tech Pitch Roast Comedy LLC, and is working with a lawyer who served on the jury to draw up the paperwork that would allow judges to earn equity in the fledgling company.
Swaney, who has also worked as a television production assistant and a movie stunt double, plans to pitch the show to potential investors and TV executives — which means she’s working on her pitch deck.
What if she presented her project at one of her own shows? “It definitely needs to be worked on,” Swaney said. “I know I’d get a lot of flak at my own show.”
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