April 26, 2004
Aspiring entrepreneurs showcase diverse business plans at UW competition
Kimbop rolls. Italian home-furnishings. An urban indoor dog park. A drug that prevents Alzheimer’s disease. Educational software for autistic children.
These are a few of the business concepts conceived of and soon-to-be proposed by students to mock financiers during the investment round of the University of Washington Business School’s Center for Technology Entrepreneurship (CTE) Business Plan Competition.
The investment round will be from 2 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, April 27, in the ballroom of the Husky Union Building (HUB) on the UW campus.
During the investment round, teams will pitch their ideas to 119 judges, including angel investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers and venture capitalists. Each judge will have $1,000 in “CTE dollars” to invest in what they consider the most feasible companies. Judges will eliminate half of the 32 teams. The remaining 16 teams will have two weeks to regroup, make any necessary changes to their presentations and then compete for a chance to snag the $25,000 grand prize.
The long presentation and final rounds take place between 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Monday, May 17 in the HUB Auditorium. Reporters are invited to attend all stages of the competition and the public is welcome to attend the final round, between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m.
An additional seven prizes will be awarded to teams presenting the best ideas in e-commerce and international and sustainable businesses. With $82,000 to be distributed among this year’s winners, the competition awards one of the largest amounts in seed funding of any similar event in the country.
Business proposals this year range from sating appetites to annihilating Alzheimer’s disease, a neurological disorder that deteriorates memory and affects 4.5 million Americans. One team, Ambrasia, for example, aims to provide healthy fast food primarily through its flagship product, a modified kimbop roll, which resembles a sushi roll but will be larger and filled with grilled meats instead of the traditional raw fish. Another team, Mist-it-tan, promises to provide a euphoric tanning experience to its customers by providing them with healthy, golden glows through “airbrushing,” a technique in which a wand is used to spray a mist of tanning foundation in thousands of fine particles over the body. And Promentix would develop and market a drug that fights Alzheimer’s disease.
Mike Min, president and chief executive officer of Ambrasia, says his team will maximize the little time given during the investment round to attract judges with an informative and enticing booth.
“Ambrasia will be a concept you can touch, smell, see, hear and taste,” said Min. “Our team will literally seize investors as they walk around. Our philosophy is not to passively wait for investors, but to proactively harvest them.”
Past winners include NanoString, creators of a company that will broaden advances in genome science, and Cogelix, engineers of a less-invasive radiation cancer treatment that doesn’t damage healthy surrounding tissue. In the past six years, the UW Business Plan Competition has awarded nearly $500,000 in prize money and legal services.
Students from Gonzaga University, Seattle University, University of Washington and Washington State University will compete.
Sponsors include Ernst and Young, Herbert B. Jones Foundation, Northwest Entrepreneur Network and Voyager Capital.
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For more information, contact Suresh Kotha, CTE director at (206) 543-4466 or skotha@u.washington.edu; or Whitney Williams, CTE program coordinator, (206) 685-9868 or whitneyw@u.washington.edu. For more information about the UW’s Business Plan Competition visit http://depts.washington.edu/cte/bplan_comp.shtml
