From the category archives:
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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Sometime in middle May you might find me emerging, blinking, uncomfortable from the sunlight, after reading and evaluating 75 or so business plans in a single month. And watching and judging and asking questions about almost as many presentations. I can see the headline:
Man reads 75 business plans in a month … and lives to [...]
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So this is a refreshing change: a venture competition you can participate in. You be the judge, really, in the Forbes.com $100K Boost Your Business contest to be decided next month. Yes, you do get a vote! And, better still,…
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I’m in New York today, looking forward to being one of the judges for the Forbes.com $100K Boost Your Business contest. Finals are today. As I start the day, I’ve been through all five of the plans, and it’s a…
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