May Demo Day 2020

Sunday, May 17, marked our final Demo Day of 2020. We had over 100 students, teachers, and audience members join us to hear 7 high school teams pitch their inventions for social good. We heard from teams who spent the past year creating innovations for impact: things like food allergy response technologies to save their classmate from life-threatening allergic reactions or quick-deploy tents to help farmers in Central Valley protect their hay.

 
 

To kick off our event, we were joined by Jane Chen, the co-founder of Embrace Innovations. Her invention of an infant incubator that is 1% of the cost of a traditional warmer has saved 300,000+ lives. During the event, she shared her path to impact, which started at the Stanford d.school. Following the same design process that our students used this year, she recounted the challenges, successes, and learnings she encountered in the last decade of building her company.

 
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Following Jane’s keynote, 7 teams of high school students shared presentations of their own. Each team got 5 minutes to pitch and 4 minutes of questions from the panel of judges. At the end of the event, we were able to award funding to all of our teams. Those awards were chosen by our star-studded panel:

  • Bob Baxley: SVP of Design & Experience at ThoughtSpot

  • Bill Heil: Board Member at The Tech Interactive

  • Jennifer Dulski: Founder & CEO at Rising Team

  • Mar Hershenson: Co-Founder & Managing Director at Pear VC

  • Nagini Reddy, Graphic Designer at Wieden+Kennedy (Prize Sponsor)

  • Dave Chathas, Design Director at Wieden+Kennedy (Prize Sponsor)

Three teams were chosen to receive $100 grants: Cartographer, Safe Step, and WinC.

Our first, second and third place winners were:

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$400

$600

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$1000

One team was also selected as the Wieden+Kennedy Award winner for their innovative design.

 
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We are so proud of all of our students who, despite a pandemic, still found time to innovate for social good and present for Demo Day this year. All of these students left with a new confidence in their innovative potential, and we also left feeling inspired and resolved to support even more young innovators nationwide.

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