CU Business Plan Competition
I was fortunate enough to be asked to participate as a judge at the undergraduate business plan competition up at CU Boulder last week.
A few thoughts:
1) It was a lot of fun. If “b-plan judge” was a well paid, full time job, I would take it in an instant.
2) The kids, mostly juniors and seniors, were pretty impressive with their suits, power-point presentations, and command of the material. I’m only 11 years out of college and I can tell you that things have changed quite a bit. Plus, the new business school building is really, really nice - also quite a change from the 100+ year old buildings I attended (::cough::) classes in.
3) The two winning teams were the only ones that had brought a physical prototype to look at. Even though the underlying business cases for their products weren’t as strong, having something “real” to present went a long way with the judges. Reminded me of the saying: “nothing speaks louder than working code” that the smart people at Google are so fond of.
4) Every single team was focused on a “real world” product or service of some sort and, without exception, completely ignored the potential online component or application of what they were working on. I’m not sure if this was part of the constraints of the competition, but it seemed odd that a generation of heavy myspace / facebook users wouldn’t include at least one slide addressing these opportunities. It’s a stark contrast from 99% of the business ideas I hear from people who are much older.
