Young entrepreneurs win
big in global contest
BY DAWN LEVY
Student teams from the
University of Sydney in Australia, the University of
Buenos Aires in Argentina, MIT and Stanford walked away
with the top honors June 21 at the Stanford Global
Entrepreneurs Challenge 2000.
"Our mission first
and foremost is to enhance the scope and quality of
entrepreneurship here and around the world -- to 'go
global,' basically," said Ted Acworth, Global
Challenge founder and chair. Acworth earned his doctorate
in mechanical engineering from Stanford this spring.
Students from 20
universities and 14 countries presented business plans to
compete for $250,000 in prizes. Members of the Business
Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES)
conceived and organized the event.
"The vast majority of
students [at the Global Challenge] were not born in the
United States, but the entrepreneurial spirit of the
[Silicon Valley] area has caught the attention of the
world," said Jim Plummer, dean of the School of
Engineering. Plummer, who serves on the boards of several
Silicon Valley companies, said he is often asked how to
replicate the Silicon Valley's success elsewhere.
"There is no simple formula," he said,
"but a constant flow of good ideas, good people,
capital, institutional diversity and luck"
contribute. The two-way relationship between academia and
industry is critical, he said, and forms the basis of a
model that can be replicated around the world.
The Global Challenge's top
prize, an "e-scholarship" from
Hewlett-Packard's Garage Program to support early-stage
companies, went to a team from the University of Sydney.
Undergraduates Cyrus Shey, Ian Wijaya and Victor Leung,
and graduate student Ajmal Saifudeen -- the oldest team
member at 23 -- won in the category of
"Internet-based Plan." Their proposed business,
Sydney Worldwide Pty. Ltd., aims to produce and deliver
online city guides and portals targeting tourists to
large cities in Southeast Asia and Australia. A city
guide/portal they created for their hometown is called
"Sydney on the Web" (motto: "We'll tell
you where to go!").
Presented by HP's Lang-Anh
Pham and Adrian Ott, the e-scholarship consists of a
bundle of products (hardware, software, business tools)
and services (support, consulting, training) from HP,
Gartner, Microsoft, Red Hat and WebGain valued at about
$150,000.
HP's sponsorship reflects
its strong ongoing and historical role in the success of
both the Silicon Valley and Stanford. When HP founders
William Hewlett and David Packard were graduate students
in engineering at Stanford, their mentor was former Dean
and Provost Fredrick Terman. Packard later credited
Terman, more than any other individual, with the
formation of Silicon Valley's technological base.
"Terman encouraged
them to follow their visions and dreams and start their
own company" in Packard's garage in 1939, Ott said.
"And this was during the Depression." With
e-scholarships, she said, HP's Garage Program encourages
students similarly.
The Australian students
already had won one free year of space in Australian
Technology Park, a technology incubator that provides
structure and services to nurture fledgling businesses
the first few years. "The [Global Challenge] prize
is going to make a big difference to their
business," said Stan Jeffery of Australian
Technology Park.
"The marriage of
academic and business environments is very important to
entrepreneurship wherever you look," said Joel
Friedman of Andersen Consulting, which sponsored $20,000
prizes for each winning team in the remaining four
judging categories.
Winners in the category of
"Disruptive Technologies" -- innovative
products that define a significant new market or
transform an existing one -- were Stanford's Farid
Nemati, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, and
Homan Igehy, a doctoral student in computer science.
Their team plans to develop, market and license T-RAM, a
unique proprietary memory that has the potential to
revolutionize the semiconductor industry by providing the
memory density of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and
the speed of static random access memory (SRAM). The
T-RAM team also won in the category of "Elegance of
Business Strategy," in which students demonstrate a
compelling solution to a tangible market need.
Winning in the category of
"Positive Social Impact" -- creating a business
that would affect the environment positively, promote
peace, ameliorate poverty or alleviate social injustice
-- was the University of Buenos Aires' Latinarte.com
team. Their business plan created an Internet site to
bring original art from Latin America to the world. Team
members Marina Kessler, Hernan Fligler and Georgette
Montalvan accepted their award in bright orange soccer
shirts emblazoned with their company's logo.
In the category of
"Global Market Potential" -- the business plan
best suited to global markets -- the winning team was
MIT's Kiril Alexandrov and Zoran Zdraveski. Their plan is
to create a business called EyeGen to produce a dye that
makes DNA visible to the naked eye. The dye is safer,
cheaper and faster than the radioactive and fluorescent
probes used in genomic, medical and biotechnological
research. The team estimates a $15 billion global market.
Other teams had impressive
ideas too (see http://e-challenge.org/ for a complete
list). Many dealt with health care, Internet services and
wireless products. A Princeton team proposed a way for
businesses involved in the apparel industry to share
information online. A University of Virginia team
proposed a device to prevent the blood-vessel collapse
that may occur after a balloon angioplasty. A team from
Hautes Etudes Commerciales in France planned to create a
soda can that can fit in a pocket and cool a beverage in
less than two minutes.
The Global Challenge
differed from other business plan competitions in that it
emphasized educational workshops with Silicon Valley
executives. Topics included negotiating a term sheet,
protecting intellectual property, being a founder,
creating a winning team, smart marketing and going
global. Students participated in e-clinics with lawyers,
venture capitalists and marketing consultants. But one of
the most valuable activities, Plummer said, was surely
the networking that occurred between students, faculty
and industry representatives.
In addition to prize
sponsors HP and Andersen, conference sponsors included
IBM; Accel Partners; Mohr, Davidow Ventures; netQbate;
and Silicon Valley Bank. Event sponsors included BA
Venture Partners, Network Appliance and Wingspring.
Production partners were ONI Systems, OSINTERNET and Voce
Communications. Executives at 25 companies volunteered
their time for judging.
BASES's Stanford partners
were the School of Engineering, the Stanford Technology
Ventures Program, the Entrepreneurship Task Force, the
Graduate School of Business Venture Capital Club, the
Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Asia/Pacific
Research Center and the Office of Technology Licensing.
SR
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