NCET

We’re expecting a record number of entries for the 8th annual Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Competition and we need a large number of Preliminary Judges to review the written business plans.

We expect about 75 plans this year, and we’ll ask each judge to review three or four of them. The plans will be available online by March 23 and you’ll need to complete the online judging before March 30. Each plan takes about two hours to evaluate and we ask you to provide one or two pages of feedback for each business plan.

Please note that we also need a few "standby" judges to be available April 1 – 4 in case any of the other Preliminary Judges aren’t able to complete their assigned plans.

We will hold two conference calls before March 23 to brief our new judges and answer questions.

If you’re interested, please contact me at Dave@NCET.org or (775) 315-7635. The students depend on your feedback, so please make sure that your schedule permits you to participate BEFORE you commit to serve as a judge. You can find more information about the Governor’s Cup at www.NCETgovcup.org.

Thanks in advance for your consideration. All of us at NCET and the Governor’s Cup appreciate it.

Videos produced by Bourns Productions

Acceptance Speech Videos:

When Chantel Waterbury came to pitch me back in August of 2010 for chloe + isabel, she started off the conversation with a simple description–that there were four other companies in her space each doing over a hundred million dollars of revenue and that, in total, they still made up a small percentage of the overall market.  She told me a few assumptions about how much each of her merchandizers would sell, and within a couple of minutes I was super psyched about the potential for her business and the scale it could get to.

It should be pretty easy to tell whether or not something has the potential to be big within a short mental exercise.  This is what is known as the "back of the napkin" approach.  I know… it’s a highly technical term so stay with me on this.

It shouldn’t take a complex financial model to tell whether or not you could have a big business.  Granted, a lot of future predictions depend on user behavior, but if I told you that I was creating a site for hipsters to swap skinny jeans, we should very quickly be able to guess the number of hipsters (some % of the Brooklyn population to start with), make an assumptions for the churn on their jeans, and what kind of fees we could charge them.

I’m surprised about how rarely entrepreneurs seem to do this calculation in their heads and test it for any kind of reasonability.  Too often, I get assumptions on taking 1% of what they consider to be their Total Addressable Market (TAM), and they get the TAM wrong anyway.  When you’re trying to build the next online grocer, all the food sold in the US is not your addressable market, because a lot of it isn’t sold direct to customers through supermarkets.  No matter how great your Fresh Direct killer is, we’re not going to all stop eating out and start bringing our lunches to work.

Read entire column here

If you startup is your dream, why would you want to think about an exit? It’s going to be so successful and so much fun that you don’t need to think about what comes after. Wrong. There are two very real and practical reasons why you need to plan an exit:

• Outside investors want to collect their return. Remember that equity investments are not like loans with interest. The investor sees no return until he cashes out, or the company is sold. Even three years is a long time to wait for any pay check.

• Entrepreneurs love the art of the start. Assuming your startup takes off, you will probably find that the fun is gone by the time you reach 50 employees, or a few million in revenue. The job changes from creating a “work of art” to operating a “cookie cutter.”

In three to five years, you will be anxious to start a new entity, with new ideas and spinoffs that have built up in your mind, and certainty that you can avoid all those potholes you hit the first time around. If your startup was less than a success, you’ll definitely want to erase it from memory.

So here are the most common exit strategies and considerations these days for planning purposes:

1. Merger & Acquisition (M&A). This normally means merging with a similar company, or being bought by a larger company. This is a win-win situation when bordering companies have complementary skills, and can save resources by combining. For bigger companies, it’s a more efficient and quicker way to grow their revenue than creating new products organically.

Read entire article here

Las Vegas might not be the ideal place to try and build a technology hotbed, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. As I reported previously, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is investing an impressive amount of money — $350 million — to help revitalize the city’s urban core and create a community of tech startups, and he already has some key pieces of his puzzle in place. And while it’s easy to be skeptical of Hsieh’s grand vision, the companies that have moved to the desert are confident they made the right decision, in part because Las Vegas isn’t Silicon Valley.

Members of the Las Vegas startup community who’ve had experience in places such as Silicon Valley and Seattle relish their new home because it’s not those places. The path to success in Silicon Valley follows certain patterns, both Habit Labs Co-Founder and CEO Jen McCabe and Romotive Co-Founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo told me, but Las Vegas gives them the opportunity to blaze their own trails and actually help shape whatever process ultimately results from Hsieh’s experiment.

Actually, Rinaudo said, being in Las Vegas has been a huge advantage for Romotive. Software developers hold all the cards and there are lots of well-funded companies looking to grow their staffs, so he can’t hire the people he wants just by waving money at them, there has to be something more. Rinaudo says Las Vegas gives Romotive the opportunity to sell potential employees on being part of a tight-knit tech community and, perhaps, the birth of something great.

And when companies get the employees they want, being in Las Vegas should make it easier to keep them. There’s not Google, Facebook and Palantir acqui-hiring the people or technologies they want, McCabe said. There’s nothing wrong with building a company where the ideal exit or career path is quick absorption by a dominant force, but people who want that won’t come to Las Vegas, she added.

Read entire story here