The downside of writing up demo days

The downside of writing up demo days

Tech writers are invited to a lot of demo days, as you might imagine. Sometimes, these presentations are very long, with many startup teams taking the stage to pitch to investors and the media. Sometimes, they’re shorter, featuring a more concentrated group of founders. But always, the pitches are concise. In fact, most incubators or accelerators take their cue from one of the original incubators, Y Combinator, which gives each of its startups less than three minutes to dazzle the crowd.

As a result, what makes it into TechCrunch (and other outlets) on the heels of these demonstrations are very much first impressions of companies —  vague outlines of what’s interesting about them. Perhaps naturally, too, these first impressions are often appropriated by the companies themselves and turned into endorsements to gain traction with early customers.

Such is the case with Vacayo, a startup that recently passed through the 500 Startups accelerator program and which last month presented to a crowd at the Computer History Museum in San Jose, Ca., alongside 28 other startups.

On the heels of the event, we included Vacayo in our coverage of the event, explaining its proposal to become a kind of property manager to homeowners who have extra space (or extra homes) their hands, that the startup says it can furnish and find tenants to fill. The company has since used that story, including on Facebook, to solicit customers.

The problem, as reported in a recent CNBC story, is that Vacayo is being highly deceptive in how it’s landing some those listings. For example, Vacayo founders Isabel Berney and Truth Oladapo rented the Miami Beach home of Bay Area entrepreneur and investor Drew Grewal, then listed the home on Airbnb without his permission.

Because of strict regulations around short-term rental in Miami, Grewal was subsequently fined tens of thousands of dollars. After evicting the pair, Grewal tells CNBC he saw some of his furniture featured in two other Miami Beach Airbnb listings. Oladapo told CNBC that Grewal asked him to take the furniture.

Another Miami Beach property owner, Rula Giosmas, told CNBC she similarly had Airbnb-related problems at two of her four properties. She said in one case, she’d been led to believe she was renting the property to a couple from New York who have a child. The tenants, she discovered with the help of CNBC: Oladapo and Berney. Giosmas now says she plans to sell the property, which she says was turned into a “flop house” and for which she has also been fined $20,000.