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Last Friday I went to the finals of the Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition.  While I wouldn’t be participating, 5 of the 7 teams had MBA students involved so I had to go and support my friends.  Plus, it’s not every day you get to sit behind judges like Sig Mosley and just listen to them riff questions at people trying to raise money.

So, after sitting through 4 hours of presentations/questions here is my list of the good questions each team fielded.  I also linked to the companies’ websites, if they have one, in case you are interested in more information on them.  What I learned here, more of these guys need websites.

NanoShield (catheter coating)
-Have existing companies in this space shown a willingness to acquire or license from new entrants?
-What are the issues your solution does not solve?
-Talk more about your pricing and how you came up with what it should be.
-Are you trying to raise any other money besides grants, the plan is unclear? How much and when?

Medivity (endoscope utility to reduce surgery complications)
-What’s the story on the company formation and how did you get involved?
-Who decides what gets bought for the endoscope?
-How long is the sales cycle?
-How much money would it take to get to the initial adoption stage?

AlpZhi (microlens manufacturing)
-What does “a great deal of interest” mean?
-Can you expand on that alternate applications you mentioned?
-How do you get from here to the first set of customers?
-How did you come to an NPV for the company?
-Are the potential customers set to take advantage of what you offer?

viaCycle (bike share/rental solution)
-What is patentable in your design?
-You’re using a European model as predictive of US adoption. Why do you think you can overcome the obvious cultural differences?
-What was the adoption cycle of similar programs (ZipCar)?
-Are you set up to capture and analyze the behavioral data and commuting patterns of your users?

Belle Curves (shape enhancing sports bra)
-What stops people from creating third party inserts cheaper?
-How many did a competitor sell previously?
-Why plan to enter the retail market is those distribution channels lower your margin?
-Why the decision not to pay yourselves and dive in full time?
-Have you trademarked the names?

Agile Genomics (bio-informatics software)
-How do you handle customer support for the users?
-What is the penetration of competitors’ software in the market?
-What is your insight into competitors’ pricing strategy and changes?
-There are great approaches outlined, but no plan for introducing them or costs.

Pneumera (pneumonia diagnosis device)
-Why can’t you sell through channels other than hospitals, like physicians’ offices?
-The key to your exit strategy is the strength of your patent, talk to that.
-The “first 50″ hospitals you mention, what/where are they and what percentage of the market do they make up?

Overall some pretty good stuff. It certainly gave me some insight as to what kind of questions people want more information on around here (funding plans, intellectual property).

Also, congrats to AlpZhi for winning the competition. I guess drinks are on Greg next time we go out.

http://www.ajc.com/sports/georgia-tech/former-georgia-tech-football-347323.html

I will swear to you with everything I have in me that, in the six years I would say I was friends with Reuben, he was nothing but a great person

Cisco unveils ultra-fast Internet technology

The new technology, known as “CRS-3,” is a network routing system that will be able to offer downloads of up to 322 Terabits per second, according to the company.

Translation: Well in Cisco terms, the router will be able to provide download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second for everyone in San Francisco, download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1 second and stream every movie ever created in less than 4 minutes.

Awesome.  Maybe this will make my iPhone connection not quite as crappy.

Every Monday at 7:30am there is a breakfast meetup at St. Charles Deli, a restaurant connected to the Georgia Tech College of Management, where a handful of local entrepreneurs get together and just talk about whatever.  It’s not an invitation-only event, you just have to be interested in the space and find the time to show up.  There are usually about 8-10 of us that come and people stick around until as late as 9:30.

Last week there was a very small turnout; it was initially just Paul Freet and myself.  The way the breakfasts had broken down thus far I had never really had a chance to talk to him about much, so this was a great chance to just ask questions and get answers.  We talked about what I’m working on, the iPad (I’m more bullish on it than he is), and his work with the GT VentureLab.  Since he does a lot of work with early stage companies now, I asked him “what is the biggest problem you see when working with these companies?”  His response can be paraphrased as:

Lots of entrepreneurs are too stuck on their ideas.  They think that whatever they come up with is a great idea and fall in love with it, even though it sucks.  The idea is to find a great idea and then work your ass off.

(I hope that, while I know the words aren’t exact, I kept the spirit of the response correct there.  I’m sure that if I didn’t hell will rain down upon me here shortly.)

I was originally a little skeptical because, I mean, how could you work on an idea you didn’t love and still see great results?  That seems like a bad way of going about things.

But I’m beginning to feel like I was a little shortsighted.  The idea isn’t to necessarily to sacrifice a love of what you’re doing for the best opportunity to make money, but the fact still exists that you can’t iterate every idea into profitability.  You can still identify a need in an area you’re passionate about and move forward after validating that a need exists.

Maybe the idea is to be passionate about building a business, not necessarily the business you originally pictured in your mind.

What do you think?  Am I making any kind of sense here?

Also, if you’re in the Atlanta area, you really should stop by these breakfasts.

I haven’t written much here lately.  I’ve been writing so much stuff between class assignments and outside business stuff I’m doing that I just couldn’t find the time or energy.  Well, all those class papers are over now so let’s open up the floodgates.

The topic for today: staking people in life.

VentureBeat had a post today titled Entrepreneurs offer their life’s future earnings for an investment.  The basic premise is people were offering to sell a small portion of their life earnings (typically 1-5%) in order to get cash up front.  One 26 yo girl is profiled who is trying to sell 6% of her future earnings for $600,000 to help pay off debts and start a new venture, valuing her future stream of income at $10m present day.

This idea is similar to the staking economy in poker.  Unfortunately the Poker staking page in wikipedia is woefully short, so I’ll do my best to explain it in a little more detail.  I’ve been on the receiving end of a few stakes and bought a percentage of others’ action a couple times so, while I’m no expert on the inner-workings like sheets is, I can offer a little experience.  In a staking agreement, I offer to pay your buyin to tournaments (you can get staked for cash games too but let’s stick with this) and then I take a portion of any winnings you get.  Usually these agreements last for a longish period of time since the world of tournament poker sees huge swings, and it’s also common for there to be a payback clause where the staker takes close to all of the profits until all previous buyins have been paid off before they split the remaining winnings at a predetermined percentage.  There’s obviously a lot more you can talk about here, but that should cover the idea in enough detail for the rest of this post.

So, given that, it’s not surprising at all that one of the founders of a fund currently offering to buy a percentage of promising young workers was champion poker player and Georgia Tech graduate Phil Gordon.  If you can identify a talented young performer and have capital available that they lack, it can be a great deal for both people.  Also, I like that they offer a buyout option for everyone so that you aren’t stuck with a lifetime debt if you want to get out of it.

Is it possible that people could get screwed with this system?  Certainly.  Over time people have shown a remarkable ability to consistently use things that should be beneficial (hello credit cards) in harmful ways.

More importantly, I like this idea because I have developed a couple business ideas around this same idea.  It would be wrong of me to not give a little credit to Bill Simmons here for his meme of “I wish I could buy stock in X” where X is something like “the Patriots falling apart this year as Randy Moss goes into ‘I don’t care’ mode.”  However, instead of that, I want to buy stock in John Wall’s future earnings.

Coming out of school, Wall is looking at something like a $5m/yr rookie contract and sponsorships that probably get him to about $7-10m/yr initially if he gets a shoe deal like I expect.  Meanwhile, you have to expect that his next few contracts and endorsements are going to be HUGE.  Max contract big.  Looking at a couple $60-100m contracts and various endorsements spread out over a 15 year career (obviously all optimistic projections) that’s probably somewhere around $200m in present value.  Actually, it’s probably not even close to right, but humor me.

What if he could sell 10% of his future revenue stream on a stock market and suddenly have $20m in walking around money?  That would be AWESOME.  It’s legalized gambling, wrapped up in unrealistic price inflation by hometown fans!  Similarly, you could do that for music acts.  What if Bruno Mars could sell a profit percentage of his first CD to raise money to get it produced himself?  Automatic democratization of the music industry, and no more predatory tactics by the record labels trying to milk an artist for everything they can.

So yeah, I love this.  I’m also open to receiving stakes

I’m not sure it bodes well for a state that is very likely to elect a Republican governor to replace Gov. Sonny Purdue that 2 or the 3 leading Republican candidates have had ethics scandals in the last year.

Nathan Deal is stepping down in a week from his post as a US Representative to focus on his run for Governor.  That also, conveniently enough, void a US House ethics investigation into his dealings with the State of Georgia where he was awarded an uncontested contract for $1.5 million of business over a four year span.  Good thing he wants to run the state now, huh?

Meanwhile, John Oxendine was caught accepting illegal campaign contributions last year.  He returned the money, but it’s never good to get caught with something like that.  Especially when you’re the insurance commissioner and you get busted accepting 10 times the legal limit of individual contributions from a guy you go hunting with who heads the Georgia Life and Health Insurance Guaranty Association.

So yeah.  Karen Handel for Republican candidate for Georgia Governor!

Yup, that’s right; The Giver by Lois Lowry.  In what was apparently the surprise of the century to some of my friends, I had never read this book until now.  I know, right?  Judging by the responses I got, mine must’ve been the only middle school where this wasn’t required reading.

Now that I’m a part of the herd I will join them in saying that it’s a really good book, both for kids and adults.  Since I’m sure you weren’t like me in missing this book for the first 25 years of your life I’ll skip the plot summary and commentary.  I really liked the overriding theme of a kid coming of age, learning the dangers of choice, and then accepting that it’s the only thing that makes life worth living.  Sage advice no matter your age, and I think the end of chapter 22 sums it all up.

Then, when he had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave.  And now he was starving.

But if he had stayed . . .

His thoughts continued.  If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways.  He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.

And Gabriel?  For Gabriel there would have been no life at all.  So there had really not been a choice.

I just hope Jonas enjoyed the sled ride as much as the memory.

The Giver

“Self-consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment.”

That’s just one of the great quotes in this 18 minute talk by Philip Howard entitled “Four ways to fix a broken legal system.”

I know that I’ve been lazy on updating my book list, but I have been reading.  This book actually came from a recommendation by Bill Simmons.  A couple years ago he started a page on ESPN Page 2 where he would review the best sports books.  I loved this and it’s actually what got me back into reading again this summer.  I read a couple and still have The Last Shot and Loose Balls sitting around to read.  Anyway, I sent him an email and a message on twitter about liking the list and asking him to start it up again.  For a short period of time he did, making some suggestions on his twitter account.

You’ll see a few more of his suggestions show up, but Adventures in the Screen Trade was my first choice.  Now, it looks like a long book, and it is.  But a lot of that is due to the two screenplays he has in there: one that he drafted from a short story of his also published here, and then the full screenplay he wrote for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Seeing as how I have no desire to learn how to write screenplays, I skipped over those and the instructional parts at the very end.  I just read about his stories and experiences.  And they were fantastic.

He has a lot of very entertaining stories about actors he’s worked with, scripts he’s seen altered, interactions between people on the set, etc. but I don’t want to ruin them all here for you.  Nothing I write in describing them will do them justice.  What I will do, however, is talk about a few other things from the book that I liked a lot.

It gets started early too.  Page 5 talks about the early days of Hollywood and how everyone had to license from Thomas Edison because of his patents.  Not many people had the money to do that, or the distribution network to really be noticed, so they all just pirated it and didn’t pay royalties instead.  That’s part of why they located out West.  As Goldman puts it

Sure, Hollywood had all that great shooting weather.  But more than that, being three thousand miles west made it easier to steal.

And look at them now, fighting tooth and nail to stop people all over the world from being able to watch their products rather than finding new distribution methods.  Hardly shocking, but you wonder what goes through their minds with things like this.

There also times when you can see how obvious it is that this book was written in 1983, the year before I was born.  Here are his thoughts on Bambi in the context of cartoon movies of the time

Bambi took all of our heads off.  Because, primarily, they don’t make movies like that anymore – animation stinks these days because of costs.  It’s all jerky and when the mouths move they don’t coincide with the words and the color is bland.  My guess is that Bambi works better now than it did when it came out in 1942, and I think it’s only going to improve as the quality of animation continues to deteriorate.

Looking back on this, it is pretty true.  I can’t remember a cartoon movie from my very early childhood that was actually that good.  However, then Disney brought the game back, hit it’s stride in 1989 and pumped out this murderer’s row of 6 straight animated movies: Little Mermaid (1989), DuckTales The Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994).  Damn.  Not a bad run.  Computer animation wasn’t far behind with Toy Story coming out in 1996 and then animated movies were saved.  Millions of kids are thankful that he was wrong about this.

This is getting long, but yeah, between the interesting facts he points out (I had no idea who does what on a Hollywood set) and the amazing stories from working on movies like All The President’s Men and The Right Stuff I would put this book at the top of the list for your next book purchase.  It’s available used for $3 on Amazon.  Just do yourself a favor and hit the link.

Adventures in the Screen Trade

Once Charlie Davies went over to FC Sochaux I figured I’d utilize my little French reading ability to check up on his progress at www.fcsochaux.fr

That worked pretty well for me, but I know there were plenty of English speaking fans who couldn’t decipher the website, and were therefore at the mercy of the American press, who doesn’t care, and online translators, which don’t work well, to try and get their Chuck D news. I had actually emailed the people at the website asking if they were going to come out with an English version (yeah elementary French knowledge!) and they confirmed that they were working on one.

However, after Davies got injured I had little reason to go back to the page very often and, when I did, I must have missed the new UK/American flags at the top that allow me to switch it to English.  Very well done Sochaux!

But, even more impressive, check out the subtle difference of the right sidebar between the French and English pages.

French

English

The English version not only has a video tribute to Charlie, because we care about him obviously, but they use a picture of him in the ad to get you to go over to the team store, rather than a generic jersey in the French page.  Very well done.  If it didn’t cost like $50 to get something shipped over here, I’d probably buy something like this or this just for their effort.