Yesterday, VentureBeat joined venture capital firm Charles River Ventures to judge the first CRV Entrepreneur Idol competition.
Held at Stanford, the competition provided great insight on the interests of some of Silicon Valley’s future business leaders. More importantly, it provided an opportunity for Stanford students to practice pitching to VCs, and get consideration for CRV’s Quickstart program, which provides $250,000 in seed money for promising ideas.
Sixty students made pitches of 60 seconds — for a total of one hour — evenly divided between first and second year members of Stanford’s MBA program, with a couple of computer science students thrown in. See the pie chart below for the distribution of students’ interest areas. You will see that the general category of digital media/advertising ideas makes up the lion’s share.
The panel of four selected what they thought were the best five ideas — with a lot of weight given to the presentation style, obviously, given the short pitch time. The top three then pitched the whole group of students, with a clap-o-meter determining who came in first place. Congrats to Ned Tozun, a second-year MBA student who took the honors (pictured above). He took home a $2000 prize for his idea to provide a LED-based source of light to replace kerosene in the developing world.
Here are the other winners:
2nd: Rohin Dhar, $1000 prize. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Digital media/advertising.
3rd: Jeff Piper, $1000 prize. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Financial services.
4th: Vanessa Stanley-Miller. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Digital media/advertising.
4th: (tied) Ben Savage. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Mobile (gaming).
Finally, thanks to 2nd-year MBA student, John Anderson, for helping coordinate the event.
CRV’s partners, Susan Wu, Bill Tai, and George Zachary, told VentureBeat they may change the format of the competition going forward, to provide more feedback to the students. They plan Berkeley next.
Tags: CRV-Entrepreneur-Idol, inv:charles-river-ventures, Stanford15 Comments
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rob said:
Who the hell still uses kerosene lamps? Besides the judges, that is…
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Wing Yu said:
LEDs are already used as novelty items. So a real world application makes sense. The LED lights can be triggered by a handcrank or other pressure-based mechanism: http://www.hogwildtoys.com/homeandcastle.html#faucetlight
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Startups.in/India said:
Excellent one. The winning plan sounds like LED Lamps Light the Way for Social Entrepreneurs
@Tom - Lot of people do still use kerosene in the developing world as pointed out in the post.
“…provide a LED-based source of light to replace kerosene in the developing world.”
Also, read this Global Challenges
“Life without lumination. As night falls, Rukman Rottor (ph) lives by the glow of this kerosene- fired wick lamp. Others manage with the light of their cooking fires.
Life’s tough in this southern India village, but it’s not the exception. There are thousands of communities like this in India with no access to electricity.
Rottor (ph) and millions of other Indians are too poor to even consider, leave alone buy battery-operated lights. But their lifestyle can be changed without spending too much. New solid-state lighting that uses solar power and consumes only a fraction of the energy of a conventional light bulb is being used to light up thousands of lives.”
and also Low-cost lamps brighten the future of rural India and Solar India.
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rob said:
Oh. You mean like this LED flashlight you can shake that uses no batteries? I would totally buy a lantern that I could shake though…
http://www.amazon.com/Shake-Flashlight-Induction-Rechargeable-Batteries/dp/B000637LTY
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Jason said:
This has already been done at Stanford and even written up in Time. Check out the links below. That being said it is great to see the interest in these types of projects.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1196415,00.html
and
http://www.cosmosignite.com/
http://www.igniteinnovations.com/ -
Audrey Ng said:
Were these students competing to see who could pitch the best? Or, who could pitch the best original idea? LED lighting projects are already in place in the developing world:
http://www.namstct.org/wlbdl.htm -
Susan Wu said:
This wasn’t a biz plan contest so much as a contest around communicating ideas persuasively and succinctly. 60 seconds is too little time to really tell if an idea is feasible or good or attractive as an investment.
I wrote a summary of the event on my blog here: http://reality.org/2006/12/05/the-launch-of-crv-entrepreneur-idol/
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Edward Miller said:
This would be awesome if it was directed at the CS department.
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Sam Goldman said:
To address some of the points above. I am a member of this team. Using IFC estimates, about 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricity. about 90% of those use kerosene (dirty, dangerous, expensive) as their primary source of light - the rest use light from candles, wood fires, etc. another 400M are estimated to have access but not enough money to connect to the grid. meanwhile - these 2 billion individuals spend $38 billion dollars on fuel based lighting a year, and contribute enormously to worldwide co2 emissions. furthermore, whereas we take lighting for granted - many households spend between 4-33% of their total income on fuel based lighting. Yes - this is not a new problem. but no - we think these new solutions are radical because for the first time they will be priced at a point where individuals in emerging markets can afford them without subsidies or charity. with a payback period of about 3 months (including power source) and 3 times the light of a kerosene lantern, without any heat, safety, or other side effects it is an order of magnitude less expensive than many other options.
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tomo said:
Ben Savage? As in the actor, Fred’s little brother who played Cory Matthews on Boy Meets World? I know Fred went to Stanford and am curious as to whether this Ben Savage is the same guy.
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Nick said:
Nope, not the same Ben Savage. Our Ben is far cooler.
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Mark Bent said:
Dear All,
We are selling LED lights for the developing world as well - please check out http://www.bogolight.com. Our lights are in UNHCR camps and in a number of African and South American countries. They are inexpensive - $25 for two - and work great. Our program is called BoGo - you buy and get one, the second is delivered to the developing world and we provide the non-profit with $1.00 per light for incountry distribution. We have 10,000 in our warehouse and have another 10,000 coming in from the factory. Please spread the news - thanks - Mark
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Floroskop said:
Hello!
I think this try. -
crane guy said:
I am not surprised that digital media/advertising makes up the lion’s share. Many pp are so web savvy nowadays and it makes sense for entreprenuers to be to look to cheaper startup cost with high potential returns
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