Campus Entrepreneurship

Just found out about The Next Tycoon — a reality show business competition that will be filming in Atlanta in August and will air in September. (the name is a little ‘Trumpish’ for me, but I am just one)

The show/contest is being produced by an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, W. Cliff Oxford whose firm spent three years on the Inc. 500 list. (he also endows the Executive MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business.) From the article at Marketwatch.com:

The Next Tycoon is a new reality show that will give entrepreneurs from all ages and backgrounds a chance to present their business ideas to key decision makers and outstanding business and media leaders. The show will be a valuable educational resource as well as a fun opportunity for all participants to share and discuss new, exciting business plans…

While the competition is based and will be filmed in Atlanta, it isn’t limited to the region. Anyone who applies through the Web site, www.thenexttycoon.biz, is eligible as long as he or she has a plan for a viable business venture to present onsite.

It appears there is an $85 fee to apply, but that sounds more like a weeder fee more than anything else. This is another example of the various models and actors experimenting and extending the business plan competition.

Check out the site, there are some interesting things in there. For example, there will be at least 100 people presenting in preliminary rounds and they are not allowed to use ppt. Information on participating can be found here. Let us know if you apply.

For the first time since 1978, no venture backed firms completed an IPO during the second quarter. Mark Hefflinger over at Digital Media wire has a nice posting on this ‘non-event.’

I have always believed that the focus on venture funding is overblown as a vast majority of new firms do not access the VC markets. That said, the statistic (from the National Venture Capital Association) is pretty staggering and underscores the stalled mentality that has gripped our markets (credit and equity).

From the post:

For the first time since 1978, there were no venture-backed initial public offerings (IPOs) during the second quarter, according to a new report from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The absence of IPOs follows an exceptionally slow first quarter, in which just five venture-backed companies went public.

In the first half of 2007, 43 companies went public.

The NVCA characterized the trend as a “capital markets crisis” for the start-up community.

The Globe and Mail in Toronto (where my friend Richard Florida offers his blog) has a great column by Michael Parkatti and Michael Marrone, current Y Combinator participants. For a bit on Y Combinator click here.

The one of the reason’s that we follow Y Combinator is because it is on the leading edge of new funding/advising models. The column is enjoyable and provides some insights into the paths of two young entrepreneurs (which include much time on campus). They will be writing columns each week during their three months in Cambridge at Y Combinator.

From their column:

For those unfamiliar with Y Combinator, it can be roughly described as a Venture Capital firm that provides seed funding for startups. However, their obvious corollaries with the traditional venture capital industry end there.

From a first-time founder’s perspective, Y Combinator is exactly the sort of program that provides the means to achieve our ambitions. On top of the seed investment, they also provide many of the intangibles (product advice, connections, ready access to hundreds of potential investors) that first-time entrepreneurs usually lack. In exchange they receive a small percentage of equity from each founding team. For the current three-month session (June to August), 22 teams have converged on the Boston area.

For two Canadian guys from St. Albert, Alberta and Belleville, Ontario who are long on ideas and short on connections, it’s exactly the opportunity we were looking for to take our startup to the next level.

Just received a news update that the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative at ASU has awarded another round of seed financing to student entrepreneurs on campus. According to the East Valley Tribune,

Sixteen fledgling businesses operated by Arizona State University students have received a total of $200,000 in grants from the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative to help them become established.

The student-owned enterprises will receive between $2,000 and $20,000 each in seed capital and will be provided office space at SkySong, ASU’s innovation center at McDowell and Scottsdale roads in Scottsdale.

Nearly 150 student entrepreneurs applied for funding this year. Winners were chosen based on an initial application process and a live presentation to a panel of seven judges.

Congratulations to all the campus entrepreneurs at ASU taking part in the Edson program. What a great resource to be taken advantage of and it appears there are plenty at ASU looking to do just that.

Why don’t more schools offer these types of programs? Any thoughts?

I was lucky enough to work in Dayton a few months back with the Creative Class Group. They have some great people there and some great universities. Today I found out about a really cool student venture that won the University of Dayton’s Business Plan Competition.

Salud del Sol, an innovative new business from a team of University of Dayton students aimed at bringing the ‘health of the sun’ to medical treatment in developing countries, took home the $10,000 first prize to help get the venture off the ground.

Winning the 2008 University of Dayton Business Plan Competition, the team of Lauren Dokes, Lori Hanna (pictured above), Daniel Hensel and Anna Young created a business plan to developo and market solar cookers and solar-powered sterilizers.

Here is a video interview with Lori Hanna. According to Hanna, b/c many villages in Nicaragua lack electricity, “nurses have to travel to bigger health centers or hospitals to use sterilizers, sometimes traveling long distances by bus and spending precious time and money to have access to equipment.” If they solve this problem I’d imagine they’d be bringing a lot of value to those people in Nicaragua.

I am not sure how much it costs to manufacture solar cookers and sterilizers, but it demands that we delve further into the social entrepreneurship debate. How do we measure social value? While entrepreneurs have always created social value (sometimes negative), we would primarily measure their ventures via income and shareholder value. These new ventures demand new metrics and measures related to social impact or value. Any thoughts?

When bplan comps first appeared they were student led initiatives. At some point they became more corporate oriented, with law firms, vcs, angels, and bankers taking a role. Then came policy makers (Govs/Ec Dev Offices) and media companies. In that last category — Forbes is back with its 2nd annual 100K Boost Your Business Contest. Entries will be taken until May 31st.

The first round is tough in that it asks for 500 words. So, you better be a pretty good writer, or find one, if you are going to get outta that first round. Here are the submission instructions. Here is a video with Forbes.com Entrepreneur Editor Brett Nelson.

Big prizes in this contest. The Minnesota Cup — a business plan competition in the land of 10K lakes  has doubled its prizes. Winners gets 50K in cash! From the Pioneer Press:

The Minnesota Cup, a statewide contest that promotes innovative business ideas, has doubled the prize money it will award its top three winners this year.

The top three entrants will receive $50,000, $10,000 and $5,000 respectively, cup officials said today. The top student entrepreneur will receive $5,000 in prize money.

The contest will accept business idea submissions starting today through May 23 online at www.minnesotacup.org. The Minnesota Cup, which is sponsored by the University of Minnesota, Wells Fargo Bank, the state of Minnesota, the James J. Hill Reference Library and others, has attracted 1,800 contestants since its inception in 2005.

A few years ago when I wrote my first paper on bplan contests, most folks thought I was nuts. But I knew something was going on. I was aware that contests and prizes were growing. I observed that groups outside of the business school and the university were holding contests. I began to see stories of policy makers putting the contest into place.

According to a story at Rapid Growth (out of Grand Rapids I believe), the State of Michigan is putting up $30 million for winners of business plan competitions. Now that is a lot of cheddar. I am trying to find verification on this story from the state or other sources and will post an update later. From the story by Deborah Johnson Wood:

Some $30 million is soon to be up for grabs in the second statewide business plan competition sponsored by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The funds will be awarded as grants and loans for winners of the competition.

The contest seeks to spur commercial development and job growth in four competitive-edge technology sectors: life sciences, advanced automotive manufacturing, alternative energy, and homeland security and defense.

Connecticut Business Plan Competition; “The Connecticut Venture Group’s tenth annual Connecticut Business Plan Competition is seeking business plans from undergraduate and graduate students attending colleges and universities in Connecticut. Winners of the spring 2008 competition are eligible for cash prizes of up to $35,000.”

Wake Forest’s 9th Annual Elevator Competition; “Thirty percent of the applications for last year’s annual Elevator Competition at Wake Forest University’s Babcock Graduate School of Management could have fallen under the heading of social entrepreneurship. As a result, a second set of elevators will be added specifically for socially minded entrepreneurs at this year’s ninth annual event, scheduled for March 28-29 at the Wachovia building in downtown Winston-Salem.”

Rice University’s Business Plan Contest; “The 2008 Rice Business Plan Competition will take place on April 3-5, 2008. The competition, hosted by Rice Alliance, has grown to become the largest and richest intercollegiate MBA/graduate-level business plan competition in the world, with more prize money, more teams competing, and more judges than any other competition.

Great piece by Zachary A. Goldfarb in the Washington Post about Daylert, a venture created and launched by a campus entrepreneur at Virginia Tech. Moreover, its early activities appear to have made use of the campus as market model. The articles goes through the successes and struggles that the social networking firm/website has experienced.

From the article,

By the time he arrived at Virginia Tech in January 2004, Fahad Hassan still was not over his first business failure. He had poured his heart into a computer support business in his final year of high school, but after a promising few months the customers dried up and the expenses ballooned.

At Virginia Tech, he didn’t feel invested in classes and even got rejected as a business major. He was so stressed that he took a term off.

Then, in the summer after his junior year, inspiration struck. The Gaithersburg student pulled out a notebook — a brown diary where he’d write personal notes and paste motivational messages — and started to sketch a Web site.

He imagined a social networking place, featuring the friend-linked-to-friend aspects of such popular destinations as Facebook and MySpace. But his site would include calendar and contact features, and mix in course management software favored by schools and colleges.

Last year that idea became a company called Daylert, with Hassan as its 21-year-old chief executive.