Entrepreneurial Intensity at George Mason University

As the fall semester winds down, there has been a flurry of activity for me on the entrepreneurial front. As my course, New Venture Creation, came to a close, we held an in class business plan competition. Our 8 teams (5 members each) wrote business plans, and over the final two sessions presented 15-20 minutes pitches.

A variety of ideas were represented: from a premium day-care center offering unique, enriching after class programs (Tae Kwon Do / Piano Lessons / Languages) to an enhancement beverage startup targeting students, there were some great plans and strong pitches.

Two of the top teams were offered a spot in George Mason Universities School of Management’s 3rd Annual Dean’s Business Plan Competition on Friday December 11. In this competition, teams from various school’s and classes, compete for best business plan and best sustainable business idea.

The two teams representing my class did very well — earning 1st place, 3rd place, and the sustainability prize (the 1st place team). The top prize/sustainability prize winner was Breathe, the aforementioned enhancement beverage firm, and Rent-83, a graphing calculator rental startup targeting college students.

Finally, yesterday, I attended a great planning session for the Young Entrepreneur’s Academy that GMU holds each February. The academy is offered to aspiring entrepreneurs at GMU, other local colleges and schools, and local high schools.  Practical learnings and creative exercises are offered throughout the program and there are opportunities to network and ask specific questions about an idea or a startup.

It is exciting to be a small part of a growing, aggressive community of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship educators.

New Social Venture Seed Fund

Technology Underwriting Greater Good, a new seed fund for social ventures targeting teenagers has been created by venture capitalists in New England. TUGG was highlighted by Brian Gormley at the Venture Capital Dispatch Blog at the WSJ. From his blog post,

“We wanted to look at this [as] more of a movement than an entity,” Fagnan said. “The most impactful thing we can do for this community is to start to focus on social entrepreneurship and social innovation.”

Which groups receive funding will be partly up to a network of entrepreneurs and community members. Through its Web site, http://www.tugg.org, anyone can submit an idea for a project to be funded. Fagnan and Taneja also envision a system in which community members vote on the most worthy programs. Their vote would be factored into funding decisions.

The hope is that this “crowd-sourcing” approach will enable the best ideas to bubble to the top, Taneja said.

Pitch to Under Armour CEO, Win $15K — U Maryland

“Calling all University of Maryland student entrepreneurs and recent graduates! Do you own and run your own business? Do you think YOU are one of the best UM entrepreneurs? Tell your story to the whole University and to one of UM’s most successful entrepreneurs, Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour. If you convince Kevin that you are the best, in addition to a great connection to Kevin and other prominent alums, you will take home the Cupid’s Cup, an annual award to the best UM student entrepreneur, and $15K in cash!” –  from UMD.

I am fortunate to live near UMD and visit their great b-school periodically. I recently attended one of their Pitch Dingman contests (a weekly event for students to pitch new ventures; the end of month session awards $2500) and will be posting on the event later this week. They have put a lot of thought and time into building an entrepreneurial eco-system and there is much to gain for campus entrepreneurs in College Park, MD.

Check out the Cupid’s Cup Website to see how an entrepreneurial business school puts it together.

Sparkseed Social Innovation Calls for Undergrads

Just received an update from Sparkseed, a social venture fund/accelerator that provides “offers a comprehensive program for collegiate social innovators.” Ten students will be chosen to participate 

Sparkseed Innovators receive:

• Six months of comprehensive support, including:
  • Mentoring from entrepreneurs and executives
  • $20,000 in pro-bono services, such as legal counsel, accounting, design, etc.
  • $1,000 in seed money and up to $10,000 in follow-up funding
  • Skill-building webinars on topics such as writing a business plan, managing a team, pitching to investors, leveraging social media, and measuring impact
  • A four-day summit including networking, skill-building, and strategic planning.
  • A national network of young social entrepreneurs

What else you need to know…

• Applicants must be college students, but not graduating seniors.
• You can apply individually or with a partner.
• This is not simply a grant; this is a social innovator development program. While we do provide seed funding to our social innovators, you should not apply for this reason. The training, tools, and connections that we offer are the real value-adds.

The Sparkseed Competition’s first round is open until Feb 7, 2010. You must submit a video pitch and also fill out a profile on the Sparkseed page.

MTVU’s Social Entrepreneurship Contest Is Open

mtvU has opened a new social entrepreneurship (or social innovation) contest targeting college aged students. Some of the finalist will be featured on a new show on mtvU called “Movers and Changers”. Grand prize is $25,000 for the winning venture and a chance to ring the opening bell at the NYSE. Three finalist will fly to NY and present to leading social entrepreneurs including Blake Mycoskie, Chief Shoe Giver of TOMS SHOES.

From their press release:

“Movers & Changers” calls on 16-28 year old college students, individually or in teams of up to three people, to develop and produce a compelling business proposal to revolutionize the future of the world’s social market.  Ideas must be creative, original, and scalable to large corporations, in addition to illustrating determination and persistent optimism.  Students can submit entries online at http://www.moversandchangers.com and are encouraged to submit a video “elevator pitch” application beginning at noon on August 17, 2009 through midnight on October 16, 2009.

The competition will culminate at NYSE Euronext’s Global Entrepreneurship Week: Mentoring Madness, where students from around the world will gather with business leaders and hear leading entrepreneurs talk frankly about how young people can create their own futures.  The top three “Movers & Changers” teams or individuals will fly to New York City for “Mentoring Madness,” to network and connect with prominent business leaders and present their pitches to the NYSE “Movers & Changers” Board.

I love what is happening with growth of social entrepreneurship in and around college campuses and look forward to seeing what some of the entries are. Nice work my MTV & Viacom on this one.

As some of you may know, my company, Family Fantasy Sports, is a social venture focused on higher education funding and I was named a Campus Fellow at George Mason University (GMU) during its participation is Ashoka’s Campus Changemakers Program. I was also lucky enough to participate in a semester long Social Entreperneurship Seminar with Phil Auerswald at Mason’s School of Public Policy (SPP).

So get out there, take advantage of this opportunity to get involved in changing the world. Use this exercise to ask questions, sharpen your ideas, play with YouTube, and look into all the challenges that surround launching a new venture, social or otherwise.

Vote for Entrepreneur Mags College Entre of Year

Voting is now open for Entrepreneur Magazine’s College Entrepreneur of the Year. There are 5 entrepreneurs in the running, you can read about each and watch a video on each. You get only one vote. Here is a snippet on one of the entrants: Jonathan Shriftman of USC. A 21 year old entrepreneur major.

In cosmopolitan cities, a popular trend originated by the “hipster” youth of riding fixed-gear, single speed bikes has emerged. These rare bicycles are usually built piece by piece, with parts traditionally imported. Once a bike is finished, it will total an average amount that most can’t afford.

Sole Bicyles will be the first mainstream provider of affordable, fully built, fixed-gear bikes, selling them through e-commerce, then shipping them directly to the consumer’s door. We solve the pain for people who want these awesome track bikes, yet simply can not afford to buy one, or don’t have the resources to custom-build one.

Sole Bicycles’ mission is to be an innovative provider of fixed-gear bicycles, serving as the tipping point to bring a hip, socially responsible trend mainstream by offering the most competitive, fair prices, ease of purchase, all for the utmost in supreme, quality products.

VC Continues to be Overrated; Policy Makers Beware!

For years I have been reminding people that less than 5% of firms ever take any kind of venture investment — that is one of the reasons I find the growth of business plan competitions so odd. Why prepare students for pitching to Venture Capitalists when most of them will never do it? (We’ll answer that in another post).

Well, there is a growing chorus of entrepreneurship bloggers sounding the alarm that policy makers are focusing too much on the VC model when talking about economic recovery.

Growthology (a blog out of Kauffman) and The Entrepeneurial Mind (Jeff Cornwall) have both pointed to a study by Paul Kedrosky of Kauffman: Right-Sizing the US Venture Capital Industry. From the study (p.5):

External capital is sometimes required by some private companies in their early stages, and it is good that there is a class of professional investors with enough financial resources to provide that assistance when it is needed. However, venture capital and entrepreneurship are separate phenomena, even among growth companies, and conflating the two, let alone implying that the former causes the latter, is untrue and unhelpful.

This is a short paper and well worth reading. Thanks to Kauffman and Kedrosky for putting this out there.

Georgetown BSchool Hires 13 Profs, Says No to Entrepreneurship

According to the Washington Business Journal, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business has hired 13 new professors for the fall. None teach or research entrepreneurship — well entrepreneurship is mentioned once in the press release, but as an after thought in describing an instructor who does not have a PhD and spent a major part of their career in corporate finance at Lockheed Martin.

I have looked around McDonough’s site and see little regarding entrepreneurship. There appears to be a club and a few classes, but not concentrations, research centers, or entrepreneurship centers. They do host the Mid-Atlantic Business Plan, but the MIT Enterprise Forum actually runs the event.

I just attempted to call the Dean’s Office (George G. Daly) to find out more as Daly was quoted in the article and press release. His office pushed me off to associate Dean Chris Kormis. She was not available. I will hopefully hear back from her soon.

So, at this point, I am not sure why Georgetown didn’t hire any entrepreneurship profs in this hiring spurt. With entrepreneurship being the fastest growing field in business education this appears to go against the trends.

VC Investors Don’t Care About BPlans

Writing a business plan is something virtually every entrepreneur and entrepreneurship student does. A new study out of U of Maryland, authored by my friend David Kirsch and co-authors Brent Goldfarb and Azi Gera). From the NYTimes article by Brent Bowers:

Researchers found that venture capitalists, who screen hundreds or thousands of solicitations each year, pay little or no heed to the content of business plans. Instead, the study said, because they make decisions “under conditions of high uncertainty,” venture capitalists rely on instinct and their expertise in ferreting out information by other means to evaluate the prospects of a business.

That means, the study said, that they pay little attention to the documentation from entrepreneurs about their academic credentials, work or start-up experience, previous success in raising equity capital, ability to form a top-notch management team or even how much money they want.

“In general, business plans don’t matter,” said Brent Goldfarb, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, who wrote the study with David A, Kirsch, also an associate professor at the school, and Azi Gera, a doctoral student. “Nobody is going to read them.”

That assertion flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that writing a business plan is one of the first and most essential tasks an entrepreneur should undertake, Mr. Goldfarb acknowledged. But, he says, the report’s conclusions jibe with the feedback he gets from venture capitalists.

What Happened @ Wharton’s BPlan Competition

There are some smart people at Wharton (and within the broader UPenn neighborhood) so its worth reading about their business plan competition. From Knowledge@Wharton:

Competing for more than $70,000 in cash and prizes, the eight teams that reached the BPC finals presented their plans on April 29 to a panel of judges and an audience of nearly 300 venture capitalists, business leaders, faculty and students. The competition is open to any University of Pennsylvania student and is managed by Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs.

Despite the challenges of starting a business during a down economy, interest in the BPC was higher this year than in the past two years. More than 160 teams entered the contest compared to 145 last year and 151 the year before. BPC 2009 launched last fall with the submission of students’ business concepts. The teams then competed throughout the year for a spot as one of the eight finalists.

The range of industries/firms is pretty fascinating: from open source toy robot teddy bears to online bill splitting services (think roommates paying rent/cable/etc.)… Good stuff. Good on you Wharton.