Demo will never move to S.F., organizer says

Bloomberg photo

Erick Schonfeld, executive producer of the annual fall Demo conference, says he prefers to stage it in Silicon Valley instead of San Francisco.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Demo, the grandaddy of tech startup launch conferences, will never move to San Francisco, according to the man in charge of the three-day event that gets underway tonight in Santa Clara.

"I've done shows in the city, beginning with my years at TechCrunch," Demo Executive Producer Erick Schonfeld told me. "I will do one-day events in San Francisco. But this conference is better in Silicon Valley."

That's because the 1,000 attendees are coming to network, as well as to hear the startup pitches, Schonfeld said. "At conferences in the city, people scatter at the end of the day. There are too many distractions."
Demo's fall show has moved around during its 22-year history but it has been in Santa Clara for the past few years. The show had the spotlight to itself in the 1990s and earned a reputation as the best place to discover promising new technologies and startups like VMware, Palm, Salesforce and Tivo.
But pitch competitions have become commonplace, especially in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, dominated by marquee events like TechCrunch Disrupt and Demo Days from the likes of Y Combinator and 500 Startups.
"There are a million places where you can hear startups pitch on stage," Schonfeld said.
Yet he insists that Demo remains relevant and he has made changes to make sure it stays that way.
"My whole approach is to take this back to being the place where you will see amazing companies and discover new technology," he told me.
There will be only 41 companies on stage this year, down from over 70 in recent years.
"That is still a lot of startups but I concentrated this year on quality, not quantity," Schonfeld said. "There has been a lot of time spent finding the right companies for Demo this year."