This is Cornell Johnson Women in Technology’s (JWiT) inaugural Idea Pitch Competition. The competition gives aspiring entrepreneurs currently pursuing their MBA the opportunity to learn how to effectively formulate and communicate the value of innovative ideas and turn them into real opportunities.
Each year, more and more women set out on the journey to launch and lead their own technology companies, yet many female business owners still face significant obstacles because of their gender. The goal of JWiT’s Idea Pitch Competition is to encourage and inspire business-savvy women to pursue their dreams of founding startups.
The advantages for students in JWiT’s Idea Pitch competition are:
- Access to unbiased and high quality judges, all of whom support women in entrepreneurship
- Opportunity to receive quality and unbiased feedback from experts
- Ideas will be ready to be presented to possible sources of funding to take it further
- Network with other venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with various complementary skill sets
The competition is open to MBA students at top business schools within the United States. To support the mission of JWiT’s Idea Pitch Competition, each team is required to have one female founder.
General Requirements
Team
- At least one female founder on a team
- At least one team member must be an enrolled MBA student of an accredited business school
- No less than two and no more than five members to a team
- Participants may not join more than one team
Idea Pitch
- The proposed idea should be pre-revenue and suitable for funding at some level to take it further
- The proposed idea should not be in violation of any intellectual property rights as far as you are aware
- Teams or team members that have received any form of venture capital financing for their idea or a likeness thereof may not participate in the competition. Competition participants may not contact judges from any round and judges are not to contact any participants during the course of the Competition.
Prizes
The winning team of the pitch competition will be awarded:
- $120,000 worth of software and cloud services from Microsoft
- A legal consultation session with Ann Baker (bio below)
- Pitching to a VC mentoring session with Tracy Chadwell (bio below)
- An IBM Prize of a mentoring session with Mr. David S. Rose.
- David S. Rose is an Inc. 500 CEO, serial entrepreneur, super angel investor, best selling author and keynote speaker who has founded or funded over 100 pioneering companies. He has been described by Forbes as “New York’s Archangel”, by BusinessWeek as a “world conquering entrepreneur”, by Crain’s New York Business as “the father of angel investing in New York”, and by Red Herring magazine as “patriarch of Silicon Alley”. He is the New York Times best selling author of Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money & Having Fun Investing in Startups.
- One year Creative Cloud subscription worth $600 from Adobe
Judges
Tracy Chadwell, Partner at Coyote Capital
Tracy is the Founding Member of Coyote Capital which makes seed and Series A investments in technology companies with at least one female founder. Current portfolio companies include: BeautyCounter, Glassbreakers, Shareablee, Tempo Automation, Modumetal and Rapt Media. She was formerly a Partner with Baker Capital, a telecommunications private equity firm with more than $1 billion under management. She also was a Vice President with Robertson Stephens, a San Francisco based investment bank. She currently serves as a Board Member and Treasurer for the Belle Haven Land Co. She also serves as an Advisory Board Member for the TIAGirl Club and as an Ambassador for Kara Ross’s Diamonds Unleashed. She is an attorney and earned her JD at Loyola University of Chicago and her BA from Trinity College in Connecticut.
Ann S. Baker, Partner at Perkins Coie LLP
Trial attorney Ann Schofield Baker has prevailed in court and resolved disputes for some of the most recognized brands in fashion, athletic wear, technology, food and beverages, movie production, financial services and advertising. As a first-chair trial lawyer, Ann focuses on high stakes, bet-the-business litigation and protecting her clients’ valuable copyright, trademark and patent rights.
In addition to her focus in intellectual property litigation, Ann has a wide-ranging practice that includes the prosecution and defense of an extensive variety of complex commercial disputes. She has represented clients as lead trial counsel throughout all phases of litigation, including jury and bench trials, and has also represented clients in various alternative dispute resolution proceedings. She lectures nationally and internationally, and is frequently called upon by print and television media to opine about developments in civil and intellectual property litigation. Ann has participated in several speaking engagements relating to technology and entrepreneurship, one recent event of note is Startup 101: Great Idea to Great a symposium for women-owned, -run, or -founded startups.
Alexandra Jostrom, BRV Fund Manager at Cornell Johnson
Alexandra Jostrom is a 2016 MBA Candidate at Johnson at Cornell University and serves as a Fund Manager with BR Venture Fund. Her specific interests are venture capital, private equity, impact investing and shared value creation. Prior to Johnson, Alexandra spent over four years working for Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) in Boston, MA within the firm’s asset servicing business, where her positions spanned a wide breadth of strategic planning and global marketing roles. Alexandra is passionate about business sustainability issues and is actively developing a venture capital fund focused on agriculture technologies. She is an Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute Fellows Program Associate, and VP of Strategy for the Sustainable Global Enterprise Club.
LinkedIn
Process
Round One
- All teams must register using the registration form on this website.
- Electronic submission: Pitch decks must be submitted via the submission link on the website by 11:59PM on Sunday, February 7, 2016. All soft-copy files must be submitted in MS PowerPoint format. Presentation of the pitch deck must be no longer than 5 minutes.
- Criteria: Each first round submission will be reviewed and judged according to –
- Problem addressed
- Product/service feasibility
- Business model viability
- Market opportunity
- Understanding of competition
- Competitive advantage
- Founders’ profile
- Video Interview: Teams will be interviewed by Cornell Johnson’s Big Red Ventures (BRV) Fund Managers for 10 minutes.
- Advancement into Final Round: Five teams will be notified on Saturday, February 20th to be invited to the present at the JWiT Conference on Friday, March 4, 2016.
Final Round
- Pitch must be presented by female member of the team.
- Format: Pitch presentation (5 min) and Q&A (5 min)
- Criteria: Teams will be reviewed and judged according to factors in aforementioned mentioned criteria as well as quality of pitch delivery.
- Finalist: 1 winning team will be announced at the conclusion of JWiT Conference.
