Not Your Grandpa’s Demo Day
Last Thursday, I sat in a theater in San Francisco watching a three-minute film about malaria surveillance. It featured AI, 3D-printed hardware, smartphones, and mosquito corpses.
It was the Fast Forward annual demo day—my third year in attendance.
If you haven’t heard of it, Fast Forward is a startup accelerator, but for tech nonprofits. Instead of trying to help crypto bros become overnight unicorns, Fast Forward helps nonprofits build like startups: product, pitch, brand, metrics, capital strategy, all tightened, sharpened, and shipped in less than 12 weeks.
The program ends with Demo Day, where ten startup nonprofits presents what they’re building and the impact they’re already having. There’s a stage, there are lights, and of course there’s hummus in ceramic ramekins.
Some of my pals taking a break from the open bar
It feels like Y Combinator, if YC was obsessed with public health, equity, literacy, and planetary survival instead of AI chatbots and fintech for dog moms.
I go to Demo Day every year to support my friend Summer, who’s been at Fast Forward for six years and now runs Strategy and Ops. Every year I walk out insanely inspired, pondering some of the largest problems facing our world and contemplating what happens when you take Silicon Valley’s tools and point them somewhere else; not toward blitz-scaling or valuation bumps, but towards public good and problems that don’t end with an acquisition or an IPO.
Tech Nonprofits: Not an Oxymoron!
Most people still don’t know what a tech nonprofit is, but you probably use one multiple times a week: think Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Mozilla/Firefox, and Wordpress.org.
Tech Nonprofits are companies that use technology (products, platforms, data infrastructure) but operate under nonprofit legal structures. They raise grants and donations and some even have revenue models in order to be self-sustaining.
Notably, tech nonprofits aren’t guided by MAUs or GMV, but instead focus on impact—things like learning hours in underserved schools or homes purchased by first generation immigrants.
Thanks to Summer and her team at Fast Forward, incredibly smart, deeply accomplished people are getting the infrastructure they need to tell their story clearly and get in front of people who can write real checks.
Scan the Demo Day sponsor list and you’ll see all the usual suspects: Google, Bloomberg, Splunk, Okta, Deloitte. These are some deep pockets.
Arguably, many of these companies are responsible for some of the world’s sharpest edges… economic inequality… algorithmic polarization… the slow erosion of civic trust… (just a few examples that came to mind).
Their sponsorship of Fast Forward’s Demo Day raises the obvious question: Can the institutions that helped break the world really expect to be seen as our saviors?
Best case: It’s a genuine effort to rebalance the equation; to tip the scales, however slightly, toward something more just.
Worst case: It’s hat starch; a clean logo on a cause that makes people feel good for a few hours.
Either way: The checks clear!
Three Takeaways From Demo Day 2025
1. Production Value Is Leverage
This event was flawlessly executed. Not just the lighting and the passed apps, though those helped, but the entire presentation layer of these orgs was dialed.
The decks were polished and the pitches were tight. The three-minute videos Fast Forward helped each org produce were emotional and compelling.
It’s clearly working. Because when the assets are great, those big-name funders want to be associated with you. Google, BlackRock, Bloomberg don’t show up for charity, they show up for excellence.
Takeaway:
No matter what you are building, thoughtful design, intelligent collateral, and strong brand signals make other people feel proud to put their name and logo next to yours.
These things tell your audience: we take this seriously and so should you.
Focusing on production value can level you up, allow you to punch above your weight, and attract talent and capital eager to attach themselves to something that signals taste and competence.
2. Measure What Moves People
Every startup had a unique way of quantifying their impact, and the smart ones got creative with it.
It was never: “We served 1,000 students.”
Instead: “We delivered 7.4 million learning minutes to underserved high schoolers.”
Not: “We distributed mosquito-tracking tools.”
Rather: “We identified 3,200 infected mosquito species across 8 countries.”
It’s the same idea as telling a good story. Pathos, ethos, logos and all that. The best stories are visual, visceral, and specific.
Takeaway:
Great orgs don’t just measure outcomes, they frame them so they land with a punch. The number is just the raw material, the story is the finished product.
“7.4 million learning minutes” isn’t just more specific, it’s more emotional, more visual, and more persuasive.
If you’re building something that depends on trust, attention, or funding, your metrics can’t be boring, they have to do the work for you.
So when thinking about the metrics you’ll share, ask: “What’s the version of this number that someone will actually remember?”
3. Pick Your Fight
The pace at Fast Forward’s Demo Day is relentless. Before a founder would leave the stage, the house lights were dimming and the next pitch video rolling. It was overwhelming, as you barely had a moment to digest the profound challenge and awe-inspiring solution just presented before we were on to the next one.
Each org was solving a fascinating problem. Home ownership. Judicial appointment analytics. Mental health. Excessive packaging waste. Each problem space vast, affecting millions (sometimes billions) of people around the world. It was a stark reminder of something obvious but hard: you can’t fix everything.
To make real progress towards a goal, you have to pick. You have to pick a fight. Pick a thesis. Pick a north star. And then become unimpeachable. That means knowing more than anyone else in the world about the problem you’re solving.
It means being so clear, so committed, and so consistent that no one questions why you are the one building this.
That often means saying “no” to worthy causes. Closing doors. That can be really hard.
Takeaway:
Steve Jobs said it best: “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
The essence of good strategy is saying no.
You can’t make progress by caring about everything, you have to go deep. Clarity compounds and distraction spreads you thin. Pick the problem you want to own, then build like it’s the only thing that matters.
My Personal Favorites
This line from the pitch really stuck with me: “Half of all humans who have ever lived have died because of a mosquito borne illness.”
VectorCam uses a smartphone and a $3 3D-printed lightbox to create an identification system that helps track and prevent malaria outbreaks in real time. It is mind-blowing to me that we have the technology to put an entomologist in your pocket.
It’s basically Pokémon Go for mosquitoes, but with AI and public health stakes.
I am torn on this one. Violetta is an AI-powered confidant that supports women in Latin America experiencing relationship-based violence, offering judgment-free guidance and personalized resources.
It raises serious questions about emotional tech, safety, and whether AI can (or should) be trusted with our most vulnerable moments. It’s clearly helping people, which is incredible, but there’s something undeniably dystopian about offloading intimacy, safety, and emotional nuance to a chatbot.
State judges have enormous influence over society, but the systems around them are wildly inconsistent. Some states elect judges, others appoint them. Many hope you just don’t pay too much attention. It’s a black box of PDF opinions, scattered across court websites, wrapped in deeply offensive UI, and buried in unsearchable archives.
Scrutinize is a perfect use case for AI. It’s forced modernization for a system that refuses to modernize. We don’t need to plead with courts to standardize their tech, Scrutinize will make sense of the chaos and surface it to The People, whether the luddites like it or not.
Closing Thoughts
There’s a lot to be cynical about in the world right now, but Fast Forward Demo Day 2025 was inspiring in the best way: it was focused, ambitious, and deeply human.
I left motivated to think bigger, aim better, and move with more intention.
Up and to the right.