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Students Have Success Pitching Web App at Global Demo Day in Silicon Valley
Students Have Success Pitching Web App at Global Demo Day in Silicon Valley
A trio of Sage Hill students competed against 17 other teams as they pitched their startup ideas to investors during Global Demo Day in Silicon Valley on November 1.
Ryan Simpson ‘19, Jackie Ni ‘20 and Tim Guo ‘20 spent that whole week up in the Bay Area, working nonstop on their pitch of their web application, Dime, a decentralized web-based basketball game with digital basketball players.
They didn’t win the grand prize, but they did win one of the top prizes: several meetings with an investor group called 500 Startups.
“We’ll be meeting with them in the coming weeks, not necessarily to discuss investment but to discuss general mentorship,” Simpson said.
The Dime group also spent a lot of time with their fellow startup founders during the competition.
“There were 17 teams from around the world, and most of them were professional developers. There was only one other high school team from Ireland,” Guo said.
They all even stayed in the same San Francisco hostel together.
“It was a lot of fun people to meet. And we all had the same goal, even though we came from such different backgrounds,” Simpson said.
If nothing else, the experience helped the students make lots of connections in the industry and they learned a lot.
“The value of how intense that week and how much we had to rethink who we are as a company. … It was really incredible. The most educational week of my life,” Simpson said.
What’s next for Dime?
“Going forward, we’re going to rewrite our application and add in a ton more features and do another round of beta testing sometime soon,” Guo said.
Sage Hill School
Sage Hill School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the School. The School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship programs, and athletic and other School administered programs.