When Murphy's law meets Demo Day

It's been a while since my last blog. I sometimes lose my motivation to write - often wondering if the world really needs yet another LinkedIn thought leader :) But all it takes is someone—other than my mom, of course—asking why I stopped writing to pull me back in.

We did a live demo at South Park Commons' Demo Faire last month and I decided to write about that experience and how Demo Gods worship Murphy's law.

For context, we're building a platform for industrial observability that uses recent AI advancements to make off-the-shelf and on-site hardware genuinely smart. For the Demo Faire, we planned to showcase this live by connecting to hardware we'd deployed at an actual site. Live demo, remote connection, actual hardware at an industrial site, AI powering it all—what could go wrong, right?

Well, unsurprisingly, almost everything.

We thought we had everything covered for a compelling demo. But, what had been humming along like a well-oiled machine for weeks, decided to throw a tantrum just the day before our demo. We got on stage for a rehearsal only to find that the demo was failing sporadically, leaving us yapping to fill the gaps left by timeouts.

After some late-night detective work, we traced the culprit to a firmware update pushed by the original equipment manufacturer. The only fix? Someone needed to physically go to the site and re-calibrate the hardware.

The site was out of state. And this was still just a theory.

So we faced a choice: roll the dice with a rough 25% success rate and have a backup video ready, or send someone on a literal flight of faith.

I caught a 5 AM flight the next morning, made it to the site, applied the fix, and—voilà—we were back in business.

If only the story ended there.

Just before our demo slot, the 110°F desert heat suddenly gave way to a hailstorm. Even the site operators were surprised—when locals say "never seen anything like this," you know it's bad. We kept pushing our time slot back, hoping the weather would give us a break.

Finally, toward the end of the faire, the rain relented and paused long enough for my cofounder to take the stage.

There I was, watching our system perform flawlessly despite all the chaos. That particular satisfaction you get after overcoming all the odds and wrestling technology into submission! The other time I remember doing something so heroic was when I unblocked a manufacturing assembly line by doing what every engineer has done in their lifetime to fix things—restart the Windows machine.

I was savoring this moment of victory when I realized the livestream had decided not to cooperate. The audience couldn't see what I was seeing. Neither could my cofounder. He thought we were timing out again!

But then he had the presence of mind to try connecting to another deployment site—it had the same issues and low odds of success. But against all reasonable expectations, it worked perfectly, and we ended up delivering a genuinely compelling demo.

Just when I thought the universe was actively conspiring against us, it found its own way to help.

This whole experience is a microcosm of startup life, in my opinion. You spend more time absorbing punches than landing them. But here's what I really appreciate about our team: we've all spent decades in high-pressure environments building companies and products. We don't panic when plans disintegrate on contact with reality. We adapt, learn what we can, and trust that if you're solving real problems the right way, good days have a habit of finding you.

Sometimes the universe just needs to get creative about how it helps.