Lyra Spotlight

Ever Built Something You Never Got to Show Off

That was the whole question, and it turns out a lot of people have but most good work get built on weekends and then lives in a repo where nobody ever sees it run. So we obviously had to change that and gave 9 builders a stage and a room full of people to use it on. Doors from 6pm, food and drinks on us, run alongside January Capital and NextGen, and Emma at the front door handing out name tags while also somehow taking the photos.

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We only planned for 35

Registrations went past 100 and we had to stop taking applications and in about 20 minutes in we were carrying chairs in from every corner of the office and people had happily given up on sitting at all, so the back wall filled with people standing with a drink in one hand watching someone's side project load. Not the worst problem to have and a fairly loud signal that we should run a bigger room next time.

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9 Demos

Luke Nguyen opened with an AR tool for comparing furniture.

Then Pranav Dhoolia with Operant Labs.

Jacinta May and Nicolas De Matteis with Percene.

James Szklarz with getcave.ai.

Pratik Kamath with PorchFlip.

Rory Maclean with LidNote.

Kien Nguyen with Kapsl.

Eric Zhang and Young Yuan with Tactiq.

And Aakarshan Mani Giri closed the night out with Trai.

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Live Software in Front of Strangers

Judges from Lyra and our partner funds took questions after every pitch, and the questions were the good kind, the type that only come from people who have already built the same thing badly once and remember exactly where it broke. Percene, built by Jacinta May and Nicolas De Matteis, took the top prize of $1000. Then we set off fireworks, because someone decided a demo night deserved a proper send off and nobody in this office has ever been the person to talk anyone out of that.

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Why This Works

Demoing your own work to a room of strangers is genuinely nerve racking, which is exactly why so few people ever get the chance to. Every single person got up and did it anyway. What you get afterwards is not networking in the miserable sense, it is 2 people standing by the food table arguing about how one of them handled auth, and that only happens once you have both seen each other's work actually run.

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That was EngFest 8 of 12. Keep an eye out for the next one.

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