I just finished the first half day of the Rice Alliance Business Plan Competition. Today was the “Feedback Round” an unscored session where the competitors present their plans, and a group of judges (there were seven of us in this room) give feedback – mostly on style rather than content.
The business plans presented were a company that derived electric power from the gasification of rice husks in rural India (University of Virginia), a company that replaces incandescent streetlights with LEDs (University of Waterloo), a company that grows a tree and uses its beans to generate biodiesel in rural India (Bits Lilani), a company that has a secret process to grind coal and make it burn like natural gas (Kennesaw State University), a company (University of Michigan) that harvests energy from evaporating water and uses it to power WIFI chips, and a company (Harvard/Hanover) that rips thin silicon wafers off of silicon ingots thereby making pv solar cell half as expensive as they are now.
Some of the plans (Rice, Kennesaw) were just outstanding in both their presentation and concept. Some looked like *I* did them ten years ago. Some of the presentations were so well practiced that you would have thought they were asking for millions of dollars (some of them are) and ALL of them are for real companies.
This is my favorite part of the competition. Though one of the judges here was sort of a snoot. I looked up his bio, and he is now running an internet company in the “stealth” mode (yeah, right) after losing over $150 million in a company that was trying to digitize the world’s books.
I only lost $35 million trying to collect the gravity gradient of the world…
The business plans presented were a company that derived electric power from the gasification of rice husks in rural India (University of Virginia), a company that replaces incandescent streetlights with LEDs (University of Waterloo), a company that grows a tree and uses its beans to generate biodiesel in rural India (Bits Lilani), a company that has a secret process to grind coal and make it burn like natural gas (Kennesaw State University), a company (University of Michigan) that harvests energy from evaporating water and uses it to power WIFI chips, and a company (Harvard/Hanover) that rips thin silicon wafers off of silicon ingots thereby making pv solar cell half as expensive as they are now.
Some of the plans (Rice, Kennesaw) were just outstanding in both their presentation and concept. Some looked like *I* did them ten years ago. Some of the presentations were so well practiced that you would have thought they were asking for millions of dollars (some of them are) and ALL of them are for real companies.
This is my favorite part of the competition. Though one of the judges here was sort of a snoot. I looked up his bio, and he is now running an internet company in the “stealth” mode (yeah, right) after losing over $150 million in a company that was trying to digitize the world’s books.
I only lost $35 million trying to collect the gravity gradient of the world…
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