Sunshine State Venture Challenge
I have just returned from the Sunshine State Venture Challenge, which is the annual State of Florida university business plan competition. I was a judge and had a chance to meet Dan Rua who also judged. Dan is the Managing Partner in the Florida VC firm Inflexion Partners and his blog is called Florida Venture Blog. Inflexion is the one VC firm in Florida that consistently looks at and funds seed stage companies (and other early stage companies).
Some observations from the competition:
- The winning plan in my section of the competition was a proprietary technology product developed by an engineering student, the same as last year. I believe he was the only student in the competition who was an engineering student and several funding sources approached him to have further discussions. Looks like we need to encourage more engineering students to enter their school business plan competitions.
- The student plans did a very good job of defining the customer need and the concept of the solution, but plans consistently did not fully explain the business model. (A business model is defined here.) While revenue models and pricing were reasonably well developed by the students, sales and distribution strategy was frequently glossed over. To demonstrate the point, one student asked me what the difference was between "marketing" and "sales and distribution strategy". (I'll come back to this question in a future post.) It appears that statewide we may need to expand the business school curriculum to include courses on sales and distribution or business models.
- For the third time this year I saw a student business plan for a used textbook exchange using a website. This concept never wins for a variety of reasons (weak plans to drive site traffic, Amazon and women will not meet to exchange books with strangers--to name a few). This business idea needs to be given a proper funeral or we need a student to take a completely new approach.
All in all it was a great time and very enjoyable. Hopefully they will invite me to judge again next year.
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