Entrepreneur challenge to go global - BASES to bring startup teams from around the world for technology contest

By Amy Christeson
Contributing writer

This June, Stanford will hold the first truly international entrepreneurial conference and challenge.

Put on by the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students, the Global Entrepreneur Challenge could be one of the largest student-run and organized functions at Stanford.

Ted Acworth, a doctoral student in the Mechanical Engineering department at Stanford, is the founder and developer of this "olympic" event among business planning competitions.

He is inviting all interested students, undergraduate or graduate, who would like to help organize the Global Entrepreneur Challenge to an informational session tonight.

The meeting, held at 7 p.m. in Gates room B01, will be a short introduction to the competition.

This is not the first business plan challenge that Stanford has seen. BASES has sponsored the Stanford Entrepreneur Challenge for the past four years.

Teams that have participated in Stanford's challenges have gone on to be funded by both "angels," or private investors, and venture capital firms.

For the first time, though, BASES will sponsor another challenge, which will be truly international. More than 10 countries will be represented by teams participating in the conference. Norway, Germany, England, France, and perhaps Russia and India are sending teams to the BASES Global Entrepreneur Challenge in June.

Most of these countries have business plan competitions of their own, and June's challenge will simply be a bringing together of all of the best of these competitions.

Acworth recently returned from Taipei and Beijing, where he held press conferences to present the challenge. The conferences were covered by major news networks and have excited the nations' governments.

The Foreign Trade Minister of Taiwan told Acworth that they want to win and are ready to support the most qualified team.

More than half of each team must be made up of students and the teams cannot receive any outside funding. The 20 teams that will participate must either be invited to the conference or submit requests that will be reviewed by the challenge organizers. The team that wins the competition in June will receive $250,000.

During the five-day conference in June, the teams will be educated by "heavy hitters," according to Acworth.

Ernst & Young, Garage.com and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a philanthropic entrepreneurial organization, have already agreed to help put on the informational sessions that the participating teams will attend each day.

In these sessions, the teams will be taught how to run an effective business. They will learn about marketing, securing finances through initial public offerings and building qualified teams of workers.

Acworth expects to see more than 100 students at the informational preview tonight. He wants to get together the most qualified group of students to make the event a success.

George Zachary of Mohr, David Ventures, a major financial sponsor of the challenge, and the presidents of BASES and the Business School's Entrepreneurial Club will speak briefly.

There will be free dinner and drinks provided.

There are all types of jobs available, from small to large time commitments. The Global Entrepreneur Challenge is a chance to learn from experienced companies and get an insight into the business world.

June's event will be covered by ABC and many publications, according to Acworth.

 Copyright © 1999
The Stanford Daily 

MOHR, DAVIDOW VENTURES ANNOUNCES ITS SPONSORSHIP OF GLOBAL ENTREPRENEURS CHALLENGE 2000

The Silicon Valley Conference and Business Plan Competition is

MENLO PARK, Calif., May 22, 2000 – Mohr, Davidow Ventures (MDV), an early-stage venture capital firm, today announced that it will help sponsor the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge 2000, to be held June 19-22. Mohr, Davidow is contributing $50,000 to the event, which is being organized by the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES), and Mohr, Davidow is sponsoring a day at its firm for participating university students. In addition, Mohr, Davidow associates Erik Straser and Jim Smith, former Stanford graduates and past BASES presidents who remain active in BASES activities, will mentor and judge the global business plan competition, and George Zachary, an MDV general partner and the first outside advisor for BASES, will serve in an advisory capacity for the event.

"As an early-stage investor, Mohr, Davidow seeks out entrepreneurs with great ideas who inspire and attract other world-class people, then we work with them to build great companies," said Erik Straser, an MDV associate partner.  "In the same way, we believe strongly in the value of mentoring students to become successful entrepreneurs.  We’re excited about the Global Challenge event, both for its global reach and for the chance to meet students who are the potential founders of many exciting new companies in the coming years."

The Global Entrepreneurs Challenge 2000, the first event of its kind to draw participants from around the globe, will be held in Silicon Valley, one of the world’s most fertile areas for entrepreneurship.  Held at Stanford University, the event will include a week-long conference for teams of business and engineeringschool students from around the world; a global business plan competition; and an opportunity for students from 20 leading business and engineering schools to interact with and learn from leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, professors, venture capitalists and management consultants.  Teams participating in the Global Challenge include students from Cambridge University, Korea Student Venture Business Center, Munchener Business Plan Wettbewerb, Princeton University, SunMoon University, Sweden’s Venture Cup and Taiwan’s WEWIN organization. "This event is adding a cosmopolitan flair and global perspective to the same great synergy seen at local business plan competitions, including BASES’ E-Challenge event,” said George Zachary, general partner of MDV.  “The Global Entrepreneurs Challenge is bringing the best of the best entrepreneurial talent from leading universities worldwide to ground zero of the Internet, which is Silicon Valley."

Whereas most business plan competitions are privately held within an entrepreneur organization or a single university, BASES is extending the reach of its Global Entrepreneurs Challenge business plan competition to the entire world.  Twenty student teams, representing numerous countries and continents, will have the opportunity to demonstrate their entrepreneurial skills and knowledge against other teams of international students.  Business plans will be judged by a group of high-level executives who are well-respected in their fields.  Winners can earn up to $250,000 in seed money or other prizes focused on a start-up’s requirements.

Each day during the week-long event, students can attend classes structured around a basic theme covering the legal, financial and entrepreneurial aspects of growing a company. All teams will be given the opportunity to have dinner with a prominent high-tech executive.  In addition, some sponsoring companies will open their firms to the students; for example, Mohr, Davidow will invite students to see what working at a venture capital firm is all about.

About the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge

The Global Entrepreneurs Challenge, a Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES) organized event, was founded in 2000 at Stanford University to expand entrepreneurial horizons worldwide.  Its mission is to provide a vehicle for winning student teams from the world’s top business plan competitions to congregate at Stanford and immerse themselves in a conference focused on entrepreneurship, and competition that provides valuable insight from top entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and beyond. The business plan competition is an opportunity for the teams to win infrastructure products, working capital and consulting support to help turn their business plan into a real venture.  For more information regarding the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge, please visit www.echallenge.org.  For information about BASES, please visit bases.stanford.edu.

About Mohr, Davidow Ventures

Mohr, Davidow Ventures (MDV) has built a reputation among entrepreneurs as a partner by taking a hands-on approach to investments and working skillfully to architect and build successful companies.  MDV possesses an extended team of experts, including the firm’s partners and an active network of seasoned entrepreneurs.  Together, they focus on early-stage investments while bringing

years of real-world experience to accelerate each company’s time to market and optimize its long-term success.  Companies funded by MDV include Accrue Software, Agile Software, BROCADE, Broadbase, ChannelPoint, Critical Path, ONI Systems, Onvia.com, Rambus, Shutterfly and Viant.Founded in 1983, MDV is located on Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, Calif., and in Seattle, Washington.  For more information, visit www.mdv.com.

"Olympics" for student entrepreneurs June 19-22 at Stanford

Call it the Olympics for student entrepreneurs, or the Miss Universe Pageant for budding startups. Next week Stanford University will host a global-scale conference and competition for the best student business plan.

The Stanford Global Entrepreneurs Challenge 2000 brings 20 winning teams from entrepreneurial competitions around the world to the Silicon Valley for a week of seminars, networking and, of course, friendly capitalist rivalry.

Let the E-Games begin.

Above and beyond the competition, the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge will provide the opportunity for students and educators to learn about entrepreneurship from top-tier Silicon Valley venture capitalists, consultants and professors, and from each other.

The four-day event will be held June 19-22 at Stanford University's Bechtel Conference Center. Teams from nations including China, Canada, France, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Singapore and the United States will attend. Winners will be announced Wednesday, June 21.

The Global Entrepreneurs Challenge was conceived and organized by students in the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES), an entrepreneurship organization.

But the contest isn't only about who will take home the top prize, or who will get their name and idea noticed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

"The Global Challenge's main benefit will be the educational experience associated with preparing and evaluating well-thought-out business plans," said Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering. "Engineering is at least partly very practical ­ building things, testing them, seeing how they work. This competition provides some of those kinds of experiences in the business side of engineering."

Each institution's delegation consists of student entrepreneurs plus contest organizers and associated faculty. During the week, the contestants and their advisers will meet representatives from Silicon Valley venture capital firms, which seed startups, and technology "incubators" that provide structure and services that allow startups to become established their first few years.

The Global Entrepreneurs Challenge gives international delegations the opportunity to broaden their networks and their understanding of global entrepreneurship. In return, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will see how technology and business play out in other countries.

With a budget of $350,000, excluding prizes, the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge boasts one of the largest budgets ever for a student-sponsored event.

The top prize for the contest is a complete e-business "back end" consisting of web servers, software and consulting needed to set up a business website. Donated by Hewlett-Packard Co., the prize is worth $150,000. Andersen Consulting donated $75,000 in prizes and cash.

Other sponsors include Silicon Valley venture capital firms Accel Partners and Mohr, Davidow Ventures. Sponsorship also was provided by Latin American venture capital firm netQbate Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank and incubator Wingspring. Other contributors included ONI Systems Corp. (formerly Optical Networks Inc.), North Asia's OSINTERNET, Voce Communications, Martel Communications and Stanford's Asia/Pacific Research Center.

Conference-goers will attend seminars throughout the week. Soong Moon Kang, a doctoral student in management science and engineering, led the student team to choose the speakers. "We tried to select speakers based on their expertise and ability to offer a global perspective," Kang said. "We asked the question, 'Now that these guys have a great business idea, what do they need to know next to transform this idea into a great business?'"

Among the seminar topics are how to protect your intellectual property, how to negotiate a term sheet and how to create funding partnerships. Opening remarks will be made by Stanford University president-designate John Hennessy, and a keynote speech will be made by John Doerr of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Global Entrepreneurs Challenge attendees will spend a day touring startups, venture capital firms and incubators in the Silicon Valley.

Eddy Chi, who organized the visits, said the most exciting aspect of the event is the impact it could have on students at universities around the world.

Although entry to the conference is restricted to the competing teams and their advisers, the event will start the flow of information, Chi said. "The teams, when they go back to their countries, will share what they've learned with their fellow students," said Chi. "There will be a domino effect coming from Stanford."

Global Entrepreneurs Challenge founder and chair Ted Acworth, who graduated this spring with a doctorate in mechanical engineering, said the event has great educational potential.

"The Global Challenge is an educational and networking opportunity for students from around the world. It is about getting tools you need to start a business," Acworth said.

"The students have done a really good job of putting together educational content," said Laura Breyfogle, senior associate dean of external relations in the School of Engineering. "The prize money, the planning and logistics ­ it is all done in the context of a strong learning experience."

The educational bent is important to Silicon Valley sponsors as well. "A lot of people think that a successful entrepreneur just needs to have an attitude and take a lot of risks," said Brian Roddy, managing partner and co-founder of Reactivity, a company that incubates good ideas and helps them develop into companies. "It is much more than that," he said. "Entrepreneurs need to understand technology, think about what kinds of products consumers need and know what steps to take to realize their goals."

"We think the time is right and we are in the right location to do this kind of thing," said Robert Kortubash, the Global Challenge's vice president of marketing and a graduate student in management science and engineering. Kortubash worked in a Canadian venture capital firm before coming to Stanford.

But not all students have experience in running such a large production. Prakash Narayanan, the Global Challenge's 20-year-old chief financial officer and an undergraduate in industrial engineering, had never managed large sums of money before, but he obtained guidance from other BASES members and from Stanford faculty and staff. "When I received our first $50,000 check, I admit I was impressed," Narayanan said.

Stanford students are learning how to make phone calls to sponsors, solicit donations and make arrangements for conference space, audio-visual equipment, lunches, dinners, social events ­ basically everything that goes into planning a good conference. BASES students convinced billion-dollar companies like Hewlett-Packard to donate prizes, speakers and money for travel scholarships.

"Many of us are spending 20 to 40 hours per week on this plus classes," said Acworth, "mainly because of the opportunity to learn these skills."

Organizing the event teaches BASES students skills they can apply to working at a small business. "This entire conference is modeled after a startup," Acworth said. "We developed a business plan and solicited startup money, and now we are going forward with it."

Acworth and his colleagues at BASES came up with the idea for the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge last summer. Stanford faculty and administration gave a nod to the conference, and Silicon Valley firms agreed to donate sponsor money.

BASES representatives hope the conference will spark success for all the competing teams, not just the winner of the competition.

"We hope to have all 20 companies start out and be successful," Acworth said. "We hope these companies will make an impact on the world by hiring 2,000 people and providing products for 10,000 people. We hope to create a machine that fuels economic growth around the world."

In the past few years, business plan competitions have been popping up faster than you can say "new-world economy."

MIT's contest dates back more than 10 years, although the University of Texas' Moot Challenge may be the oldest. Stanford, a relative upstart, has been holding an entrepreneurship challenge since 1996.

Stanford's school-wide entrepreneurs challenge, run by BASES, is first and foremost about education, Acworth said. In Autumn Quarter, BASES holds brainstorming sessions and socials where entrepreneurial types can meet and greet. During Winter Quarter, the BASES group invites Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to give workshops on how to write an executive summary, how to do market research, how to write a business plan and how to attract talented employees. "It is an incredibly valuable education," Acworth said. "You can't buy that anywhere else."

This year's winners of the Stanford Entrepreneurs Challenge, Homan Igehy and Farid Nemati, won $25,000 on May 24 for their business plan to create a startup to develop and license a new type of computer memory chip called T-RAM. They will represent Stanford in the global challenge.

The prize money counts for little compared to the real cost of starting a business, but the $25,000 purse will help a fledging business attract the attention of serious funders.

Stanford's recent entry into the world of entrepreneurial challenges hasn't stopped the students of BASES from rushing to scoop older competitions by holding a global version of the contest on a Silicon Valley-scale.

"We knew we had to do it this year, in 2000, before someone else beat us to it," Acworth said.

Wired News  

Student Entrepreneurs 'Go Global'
by Kendra Mayfield

3:00 a.m. Jun. 29, 2000 PDT
Silicon Valley is known worldwide for its startup mentality.

And a new international student competition is attempting to bring that mindset to the rest of the world.

Student teams from Australia to Singapore met last week for Stanford University's Global Entrepreneurs Challenge to see how their business plans stacked up against those of their global competitors.

"The impetus was to get the brightest students from different countries to come here, immerse themselves in Silicon Valley culture, and hopefully take back what they've learned to further their own entrepreneurship," said Robert Koturbash, vice president of marketing for Stanford's Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students.

Teams from 20 universities and 14 countries gathered for three days to compete before a panel of high-level Silicon Valley executives. The lure? Prizes worth $250,000 and a chance to snare thousands of dollars in seed money.

But the Challenge is more than just an awards competition.

Top entrepreneurs, professors, venture capitalists, and management consultants shared their perspectives in clinics and workshops on topics ranging from how to negotiate a term sheet to marketing a venture to protecting intellectual property.

Delegates from winning student teams received guidance on turning their business plans into a real ventures. On excursions to Silicon Valley startups, venture capital firms, and incubators, participants learned valuable lessons about launching startups and gained hands-on experience that will be applicable in their home countries.

"One of the key ways to develop an entrepreneurial culture is through these competitions locally," said Koturbash, one of the founding organizers who foresees the Challenge becoming an annual event. "By instilling entrepreneurshi in undergraduate and graduate students, you plant a seed so that people realize these opportunities are available to them.

"By sponsoring these local competitions and helping to create companies, that creates a synergy so that far-out technical research gets commercialized by surrounding areas," he said.

Student teams from the University of Sydney in Australia, the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, MIT, and Stanford earned the top awards.

The Australian team sent four delegates who accepted the top prize, an "e-scholarship" from Hewlett-Packard's Garage Program to support early-stage companies, valued at about $150,000. Their plan to produce and deliver online city guides and portals for tourists in Southeast Asia and Australia earned the award for best Internet-based plan.

Stanford's Farid Nemati, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, and his partner Homan Igehy, a doctoral student in computer science, walked away with awards in the "Disruptive Technologies" and "Elegance of Business Strategy" categories.

The two hope to revolutionize the semiconductor industry by developing, marketing, and licensing their unique proprietary memory, "T-RAM," which combines the memory density advantages of DRAM and the performance of SRAM. As a result of their success in the Global Challenge, the team is close to closing their first round of funding.

"I really liked being able to interact with other entrepreneurs from all over the world," Nemati said. "You realize that this idea of starting new ventures is really going global."

MIT's team of two students captured the "Global Market Potential" prize for submitting the business plan best suited to global markets, a plan to produce a dye that makes DNA visible to the naked eye. The dye is a safer, more efficient alternative to radioactive or fluorescent probes used in medical, genomic, and biotech research.

Four people from the 13-member team from the University of Buenos Aires Latinarte.com accepted an award in the category of "Positive Social Impact" for their business plan to create a website to bring original Latin American art to the world.

"As a Latin American company, we gained some exposure in the Silicon Valley VC world that is usually very closed," said Latinarte.com's Georgette Montalvan.

For some participants who submitted business plans that were focused on specific geographic markets, "going global" presented a challenge.

"For us, as Latins, it was something very different going head to head with high-tech people," Montalvan said. "Some of the language we didn't understand."

"For people who came from outside the U.S. (who weren't familiar with Silicon Valley), it was a different experience than it was for us," agreed Stanford's Nemati. "They had neat ideas and good business plans, but the amount of money they were looking for wouldn't be of interest to VCs."

The pace of business in Silicon Valley surprised many international participants, Koturbash said. "It's not quite as frantic outside of this area."

However, most participants saw only the possibilities of Silicon Valley startup culture, not the downsides of an economy saturated with dot coms and billboard ads, he said.

"They were not here long enough to get immersed in the hype."

  Stanford University's Global Entrepreneurs Challenge Locks Down Support From Leading Venture Capitalists, Entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 Companies

  Internet Visionary John Doerr to Present Keynote Address at Conference, Peter Danzig, Jennifer Fonstad and Mitch Kapor will be Business Plan Competition Judges

PALO ALTO, Calif. ¾ June 19, 2000 ¾ The Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES), Stanford’s premier student entrepreneurship group, today announced that John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, will be the keynote address at the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge 2000 (held at Stanford University on June 19-22)—the first global business plan competition and conference.  In addition, the event continues to attract industry leaders as judges and draw Fortune 500 companies as sponsors.

Judges for the event include many renowned venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists, including:

 

Mitch Kapor, partner at Accel Partners (www.accel.com)

Peter Danzig, VP of Technology at Akamai (www.akamai.com)

Hermann Hauser, Partner at Amadeus Capital (www.amadeuscapital.com)

Ron Conway, Founding General Partner, Angel Investors L.P. (www.svangel.com)

Jennifer Fonstad, partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (www.dfj.com)

Peter Wexler, VP Engineering at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net)

Doug Leone, partner at Sequoia Capital (www.sequoiacap.com)

Chin Tahn Joo, Partner at Venture TDF Inc. www.venturetdf.com)

 

In addition, leading technology corporations continue to show great support for the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge with IBM Corporation (NYSE: IBM) (www.ibm.com), Network Appliance (NASDAQ: NTAP) (www.netapp.com) and Bank of America Venture Partners (www.baventurepartners.com) the latest in a list of premier sponsors to partner with the Global Challenge.  (A full list of sponsors was announced on May 17.  The press release can be viewed at http://www.echallenge.org/gc2kpr1_content.html.)

 

“The response from VCs and corporate sponsors to help us in the inaugural year of the Global Challenge has been overwhelming,” said Ted Acworth, Chairman.  “We believe the twenty teams from over fourteen countries will gain unique insights and real world perspectives from our VC and corporate partners.”