Demo Day at Podium

At my current job at Podium, I sit in a room right outside our CEO’s office. No other team has that setup, which tells you something about the urgency behind what we’re building. We’re basically going head-to-head with ServiceTitan, a giant in the HVAC CRM space, so there’s a lot on the line.

One of the rituals I learned quickly when joining this team is Founder Demos. Every week, we stand in front of our founders, our CTO, the VP of Engineering, and a bunch of other execs and show them what we’ve built in the last seven days. It’s part accountability, part storytelling, and part performance.

And honestly... It’s intimidating.

You spend your whole week deep in the weeds of code, and suddenly you have to zoom out and explain, to founders at a high level, why what you built matters, what problem it solves, and why it’s worth their attention. Then you screen-share and hope your live demo doesn’t blow up in your face.

This week, mine almost did.

I was demoing a feature that let a voice agent actually book a job directly to our FSM calendar. First time that’s ever been done at Podium. Pretty big deal.

But the demo was risky: lots of moving parts running on my machine, audio layers that had to flow just right in a big executive room and over Zoom. I gave my little intro, everyone leaned in, and then… silence.

Dead silence.

The audio broke down and nothing worked. Thirty-plus people staring. Our VP hates wasted time. My brain? Frozen. Completely blank. I couldn’t think through how to fix it, couldn’t troubleshoot, couldn’t even talk my way through it. Inside, I thought, welp, this demo’s dead and we’ll have to circle back and admit failure.

But thankfully, a few teammates scrambled, muted the TV, rerouted audio, and somehow, miraculously, it started working again.

And then?

The voice agent answered, took my info, found availability, and booked the appointment live. I pulled up the calendar to show the new event. The room literally clapped. The Zoom chat lit up. It went from “this is a disaster” to “mic drop moment” in the span of a few minutes.

Afterward, people DM’d me saying how calm I looked and how well I handled the situation. Which made me laugh, because inside I was anything but calm. I had frozen. My mind was gone. But from the outside, I guess it looked steady.

That’s what I’m learning about myself: I don’t perform well under pressure, at least not in the way I’d like. I don’t think fast on my feet. I freeze. But sometimes? That’s enough. Freezing quietly, not panicking outwardly, gives space for others to step in, for solutions to appear, for the moment to recover.

And when the recovery comes, it makes the win that much sweeter.