Innovators, start brainstorming. The GW Business Plan Competition is kicking-off next week with a panel discussion featuring D.C.-area entrepreneurs, the first in a series of events and workshops leading up to April’s contest finals.
The free seminar—“Student Startups: From the Dorm Room to the Board Room”—is part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Seminar Series on Entrepreneurship, and will be held on the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 26, at Funger Hall Room 103.
The GW Business Plan Competition is entering its third year and for the first time is open to faculty as well as students and alumni. And the stakes are bigger than ever: The first place team will take home $25,000 in seed money; second place will win $10,000; third place will win $4,000; and fourth place will win $1,000.
In addition, $10,000 will be awarded to the best undergraduate team.
The deadline for entering the competition is Jan. 31, 2011. (For entry rules and more details about the competition and future events, see the GW Business Plan Competition website.)
“No more excuses for that great business idea you had but didn’t act on,” says Jim Chung, director of GW’s Office of Entrepreneurship, which is co-sponsoring the seminar and competition. “Now everyone has an opportunity to take a great idea, and get the support and mentoring they need to really explore whether it could work.”
“We’re trying to bring people with complementary skill sets together to build complete startup teams,” he says. When an engineer or medical student with a new idea joins forces with a business student who knows about market research and financial modeling, “That’s when you can get some real magic,” he says.
Next week’s panel, moderated by Mr. Chung, comprises four local entrepreneurs. Among them is one of the 2010 Business Plan Competition winners, David Mathison, who this year completed his master’s of business administration training at GW’s School of Business, and is a physician in a pediatric emergency medicine fellowship at Children’s National Medical Center.
He also is CEO of healthEworks LLC, the enterprise that won Dr. Mathison and his teammates the top prize in the last contest. The company seeks to create video discharge instructions that can be emailed to patients when they leave the emergency department.
He’ll be joined by GW alumnus Roland Schumann, M.S. ’97, co-founder of SwapDrive, which allows businesses to backup critical information online in off-site, secure data centers. The business was bought in 2008 by Symantec Corporation for $123 million, and Mr. Schumann worked as an executive at Symantec until this summer, when he left to concentrate on his investments and mentoring entrepreneurs. The data centers he had created are among the world’s largest.
Also on the panel will be Duke Chung, who co-founded Parature in 2000 as a student at Cornell University. The company’s web-based customer service software supports more than 15 million end-users worldwide. Mr. Chung himself is a noted entrepreneur who’s made business lists from Fast Company magazine’s “Fast 50” to Washingtonian magazine’s “Power 150,” as a “rising star.”
The fourth panelist is Haroon Mokhtarzada, who began the website-building company FreeWebs (now Webs.com) while an undergraduate at University of Maryland and ran the company as a student at Harvard Law School. As CEO of the company, following law school, Mr. Mokhtarzada helped the company raise tens of millions of dollars in funding and it now boasts more than 35 employees.