Seattle 2.0 Blog

Week 16
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April 25, 2008

FRI

APR

UW Business Plan Competition - Great ideas and great products

By Marcelo Calbucci

I was one of the 196 (!) judges on the Business Plan Competition at UW this last Wednesday. The 33 teams setup booths and pitched to the judges as they walk from booth to booth. It was very overwhelming for the both sides. A lot of talk, a lot of questions and a lot of answers.

My first observation is the competition is poorly named. It's called "Business Plan Competition" and I didn't see a single business plan (only executive summaries), and most of the companies presenting already had products on the market, being well ahead of the "planning" phase. The competition should be called "Business Competition" or "Business Innovation Competition" or whatever, but not BPC.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the companies, their ideas and the level of understanding of what it takes to succeed.

Some companies had 2 or 3 people to answer questions, usually the founders or executives, but some companies just "stuffed" their booth with unprepared people. I couldn't believe when people would tell me "I don't know what the revenue model is, I'm here to help my sister". What? It's better to have few but prepared people than anyone answering about your company that doesn't know near everything about it.

My other piece of feedback for companies is to just stop the BS with the numbers... $70 million this, $1.8 billion market, $500 million that... I heard so much BS I couldn't believe. People absurdly overstate things and they call it a "conservative value". That's because they are doing top-down projection. That's just bad.

Anyway, here are the companies that advanced to the Sweet 16, which will be held on May 22 (MC$ means they got some of my CIE $ invested):