“Ground control to Major Tom,” Prosina, the 29-year-old founder of Stellar Amenities, sings mournfully to an audience of about 100 people on a Saturday night in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Welcome to “Snark Tank,” where startup founders like Prosina pitch their companies — and comedians tear them apart for fun. Amid the laughter, the evening has a serious side. Most startups fail, so it’s important to identify and address problems early, say the panelists and their startup founders. And yet, brutally honest feedback can be surprisingly hard to come by in Silicon Valley.

The San Francisco Bay Area is the startup investment capital of the country, and every deal starts with a pitch like the one seen on “Snark Tank.” In the second quarter of 2024 alone, $18.7 billion in venture capital was raised in young companies in the region, according to data firm PitchBook, compared to $16.5 billion in the New York region and $2.5 billion in the Los Angeles region.

Despite the money pouring in, many young companies are dying. “What people never talk about is that Silicon Valley is Death Valley,” Paul Jurcys, 40, a frequent visitor to “Snark Tank” and a startup founder himself, said after the show. “A lot of founders come here to find out that their product has already been created or their idea is worthless — or they don’t have the competitive edge.”

In addition to mockery, founders brave enough to pitch on “Snark Tank” are coached on the basics, like the importance of making eye contact and holding the mic close to their mouth. And they’re quizzed on the big stuff, like: What problem are you trying to solve? How big is the potential market for this product? And, uh, what exactly does your startup do?

The atmosphere of the show is reminiscent of a comedy show combined with a tech industry networking event. Attendees, who can ask questions of the founders after the comedians’ jokes, wear Patagonia activewear and Wharton Business School lanyards. One audience member wore a monogrammed jacket that read “IDEA to IPO.”

The event was created by Elizabeth Swaney, a 39-year-old former recruiter and Olympic skier turned Starbucks barista and stand-up comedian.

Swaney said she wants to make tech more accessible to the average person in hopes of making the industry more inclusive. She finds that other tech events where founders genuinely pitch their companies to potential investors “are informative, but they’re often boring, monotonous events that don’t capture people’s attention,” Swaney said. in an interview. Today, she regularly hosts shows in Los Angeles and New York, in addition to the Bay Area.

Swaney’s golden rule for burning startup founders is to be sincere feedback on their business — and leave their clothes or appearance out of it. She admits she made an exception for the founder of a laundry startup who presented while wearing a noticeably wrinkled outfit.

Panelist AJ Gandhi, a private equity investor and venture capitalist, said the show succeeds by taking something “super-boring” and turning it into entertainment. “The only fun thing in Silicon Valley is making fun of Silicon Valley,” he said.

The companies presenting their ideas last month included BioSieve, which is working on AI software aimed at identifying drug candidates for biotech companies; PigPug, maker of a brainwave headset to help children manage symptoms of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; and Khoda.AI, an AI therapy app.

The panel bombarded them with questions and provocations such as: Your slides on drug development are so vague that they make a horoscope more specific. What would happen to Silicon Valley if autism and ADHD were eradicated? And: Be honest, did it take you more than 20 minutes to make this pitch deck?

Even the praise was delivered with a twist. “How come you had slides that were prepared and you rehearsed this and it was… coherent and a very good use of everyone’s time, why?” Heil asked Doga Makiura, founder of Degas, a microfinance platform for farmers around the world. The audience lapped it up.

Rebecca Hardberger, a 45-year-old HR professional, was less shocked by the jokes than by the business model of a founder who founded Applaz, a social network for people to post content from their phone’s notes app. “I see how bad Slacks are — I can only imagine free-range notes,” said Hardberger, who keeps a private tally of all the times her husband is a hypocrite, which she doesn’t plan to make public.

Constance Castillo, the founder of Applaz, said she is not deterred by such “fear responses.” “We want sharing notes to be about being your authentic self,” she said in an interview, adding that her platform allows users to post anonymously.

Several founders said in interviews that after taking a beating from the panel of investors and comedians, they revised their pitch decks. Ahmad Reza Cheraghi, founder of Khoda. AI, said he He reconsidered the course of his company based on the feedback he received that evening.

But it was Prosina’s Stellar Amenities that attracted the most attention, partly because of the dramatic ending to her pitch.

As she concludes her presentation, a large image of Hal 9000, the destructive AI from the 1968 film “2001: Space Odyssey,” appears on the floor-to-ceiling projection screen.

The ominous reference leads an audience member to ask a question that is becoming increasingly common as more and more AI products appear to be modeled after Dystopian Storylines of Hollywood: Didn’t you see the end of that movie? Prosina swears she won’t develop an AI that will go bad. “We’re doing Hal 9000, but a good one,” she says. “One that really helps.”

Prosina, who has ventured into stand-up comedy, said she found the event cathartic: a break from the image she had of a serious founder who had all the answers.

“I just knew that if I did really badly, I could make a joke out of it,” she said. But she also got feedback that prompted her to update her slides to clarify the market share she hopes to capture and what her startup might be worth.

She continues to call her space chatbot Tom. “I’m not changing the name. I have every confidence in it,” Prosina said when The Post spoke to her weeks after the event. And at least one audience member felt good about the branding: After the event, Prosina was approached by someone offering a $50,000 angel investment.

As for Swaney, she’s working to make “Snark Tank” more than just a fun night out. She’s filed paperwork to form her own startup to run the show, Tech Pitch Roast Comedy LLC, and is working with an attorney who served on the panel to draft paperwork that will allow panelists to earn equity in the fledgling company.

Swaney, who has also worked as an assistant TV production person and stunt double for films, plans to pitch the show to potential investors and TV executives. That means she’s working on her pitch deck.

What would happen if she pitched her performance on one of her own shows? “It definitely needs work,” Swaney said. “I know I would get a lot of trash on my own show.”