Demo Gorilla
Winter 2022InactiveMake all your live SaaS demos impactful: close more ARR faster
Make all your live SaaS demos impactful: close more ARR faster
Demo Gorilla was a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS startup, founded in 2021 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, that built a browser extension giving sales representatives AI-generated, persona-customized talking points during live software demos.The company's core thesis was that even the best sales reps relied on incomplete, manually-created cheat sheets, and that an automated, real-time prompt system could close more deals faster.
Despite a credible founding team with deep roots at PagerDuty and Sentry.io, Demo Gorilla raised only $500K — solely from YC — and quietly wound down by mid-2024 without a public post-mortem or acquisition announcement.The company's failure reflects a convergence of structural constraints: a narrow browser-extension delivery model, a crowded and consolidating salestech market, AI capabilities that were not yet mature enough to justify a standalone purchase, and insufficient capital to build the enterprise sales motion the product required.
Demo Gorilla's founding story is one of accumulated domain expertise finally reaching a breaking point. David Hayes and Manu Zope did not meet at a hackathon or through a YC co-founder matching program — they built a working relationship across nearly a decade and two companies before deciding to start something together.
Hayes studied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo[1] before joining PagerDuty — itself a YC S10 company — in 2011, where he spent seven years building out the product function from the ground up.[2] Zope followed a parallel track: he graduated from Waterloo in Computer Engineering in 2014 and joined PagerDuty as a Software Engineer that same year, where he first worked alongside Hayes.[3]
When Hayes left PagerDuty in 2018 to build the product organization at Sentry.io, Zope followed in 2019 as an Engineering Manager.[2][3] By the time they co-founded Demo Gorilla in 2021, they had worked together across two high-growth developer-tooling companies over the better part of a decade — a co-founder relationship with unusually low interpersonal risk.
The founding insight came directly from Hayes's product leadership experience, not from abstract market research. Sitting at the intersection of product and go-to-market at both PagerDuty and Sentry.io, he had a front-row seat to a persistent organizational dysfunction. As he explained in a November 2022 interview:
"It was really interesting to watch the various disconnects between what the field was given to sell with and what we thought was going on at corporate headquarters. And I wanted to solve that problem. That's where Demo Gorilla came from."[4]
The specific pain point Hayes identified was the live demo — the moment when a sales rep or sales engineer must translate a complex software product into a compelling, persona-specific narrative in real time, often with incomplete preparation and misaligned messaging from marketing. The best reps, he observed, built their own cheat sheets. But even those were incomplete.[5]
Demo Gorilla was incorporated as Demo Gorilla Inc in San Francisco[6] and applied to Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, where it was accepted and received a $500K pre-seed investment.[7] The team remained at two people throughout its operating life — Hayes as CEO and Zope as the technical co-founder — a lean structure that reflected both the YC model and the constraints of a single-investor, pre-seed capitalization.
No public record exists of how long the founders spent validating the idea before incorporating, who their first design partners were, or whether early customer discovery interviews shaped the initial product scope.
Read the complete post-mortem, the rebuild playbook, and the exact reasons Demo Gorilla is still worth studying now.