From the category archives:
Five very interesting young businesses, five excellent presentations, six judges with questions, and all of it available as online video, where you can watch the whole thing and vote for the winners.
What I like best about the Forbes annual $100K Boost Your Business contest is that it is open to everybody. I love being a [...]
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Imagine yourself as judging a business plan competition. You read the plan, watch and listen to the pitch, ask questions, and consider the answers. What do you do, in that situation, with a team whose opportunity is in your opinion bigger than it realizes? What about a team whose opportunity is different from what it [...]
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I’m leaving for New York city today to participate as a judge tomorrow in the Forbes.com Boost Your Business business plan contest. This will be my second year. I love it.
I like judging business plan contests. I’ve judged the two big contests in Texas, both the University of Texas Moot Corp and the Rice University [...]
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Craig from trackster.com asked me last week in a comment he added to my Willamette Angel Conference post:
I was wondering with all these business plan competitions that you judge, how many winners or even non winners have you seen turn into successful companies? Are there any examples that you could give?
Yes, a lot of these [...]
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Interesting question, which came to me via Twitter: “Does a business plan have an ideal length?”
It reminds me: I was about five years old when my granddad first asked me how long a person’s legs should be. His answer was “long enough to reach the ground.” He liked that.
And I borrow from him when I [...]
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Jeff Mullins is a man with a mission. He says he was a patent attorney for seven years to get to know how that works. Then he went back to school, in the MBA program at Carnegie Mellon University, to focus on entrepreneurship. He’s now got the hottest startup I’ve seen in a while, Dynamics, [...]
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Most venture contests deal with three elements: the business plan, the pitch presentation, and the question and answer session. Where does the plan itself stand, in the mix? What I’ve gathered from 13 years of judging graduate level business venture contests is the following:
The best business plan isn’t always the best venture.
The best venture usually has [...]
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What if you had to take the classic business plan, developed for an MBA-level venture competition, and shrink it down to 10 pages?
Last Friday I spent a fun and fascinating day as a semi-finals judge at the University of Oregon New Venture Competition. My part of the program was evaluating four ventures developed by MBA [...]
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Business plans everywhere. I’m reading, annotating, filling in score sheets, and getting cranky. I explained that on this blog last Monday.
So what’s with the unrealistically high profitability projections? This year it seems like I’ve discovered a new 50-50 rule of profitability in business plans, as in, 50% of the plans I’m looking at project 50% [...]
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New in My Videos: Tips for Business Plan Competitions
President and founder of Palo Alto Software. Founder of bplans.com. Most recent book is The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan.
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