Comments (0) Kauffman Foundation recently launched istart–a website community to help connect with the other startups, mentors and investors. I think the idea is to promote and simplify business plan competitions and make business plans searchable so firms get visibility from the right sources. Chekc it out.
It’s nice to see Joe Mullenbach and Alex Johansson move forward with the start-up that they began in MGMT 4080. And they recently got some publicity. Congratulations.
http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2010/07/26/daily23.html?ana=e_du_pub
I really enjoyed this video about how some technologies only have value if the necessary complementary technologies are also present. What orphaned technologies might be out there just waiting for the complementary technologies to make them useful?
Here are the bios for the judges. Lief and Mark will judge on May 6th and Ed, Tim and Clark will judge on May 11th. We are lucky to have their support.
Lief Larson
Lief has founded and grown eight companies, including his latest Workface, Inc. His most recent prior startup, Consumable Media LLC, was successfully funded in 2006 and is expected to surpass $70 million in sales by 2009. In 2004, he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Self-Service industry association and was inducted into their Hall of Fame. Lief was named #8 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top 10 American Entrepreneurs Under 30” list and was a back-to-back semi-finalist for the Minnesota Cup in 2005 & 2006. Besides acting as a media consultant to numerous companies, including IBM, Hilton, Target, and Daimler Chrysler, he has been a career entrepreneur, technologist and futurist. Lief has an undergrad degree in Business Administration and Media Communications from the University of Wisconsin and the School of Mass Communications at the University of Minnesota.
Mark Bassinger
Mark is a business leader and change agent who can quickly survey any company or industry for challenges and opportunities and customize a detailed technology plan mapped to the company’s needs. He has held numerous senior IT and operations positions in the casino, travel and hospitality industry. Mark has an MBA from the Carlson School of Management and a bachelors in music composition from the Berklee College of Music in NYC.\
Tim Kraskey
Tim is the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development of Calabrio, Inc. Tim oversees product management, marketing communications and business development. Tim started his
career as a top account manager for ADC. Following ADC, Tim joined Canadian based Newbridge Networks as one of the company’s first sales personnel. He was an Account Manager for the New York City Metro Region and later Director of International Sales – selling to both service providers and enterprise networks. Tim grew sales as Director of ATM Marketing at General DataComm from $0 to a $45M run rate in 18 months before leaving and starting his own company. Tim co-founded Sahara Networks, which developed an open architecture for building and managing ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks. Sahara was acquired by Cascade, then Ascend and later Lucent. Most recently, Tim was a Managing Partner at YankeeTek Ventures along with Howard Anderson, founder of The Yankee Group. YankeeTek is a Venture Capital fund for early-stage technology. Tim and Howard Anderson co-authored the fi rst sales and sales management class at MIT Sloan. Tim has brought his class to the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He is also an active participant and on the advisory board of the Gary S. Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship. Tim has a B.A. degree in Economics from the University of Minnesota.
Ed Cannon
Ed Cannon co-founded Cannon Technologies, Inc. in 1987 with his brother Joel. Cannon Technologies started out as a software developer/systems integrator for electric utilities in the areas of demand response and automatic meter reading using power line carrier. In later years they began designing and manufacturing wireless hardware and also moved into substation automation to complement their other areas of expertise. Today they are the pre-eminent supplier of demand response in North America, with over 150 employees and $100 million in sales. In 2006, Cannon was sold to Cooper Industries, and Ed retired from Cooper in the summer of 2008. Ed is a native of Sioux Falls, SD and holds a BSEE from SDSU. After graduation, he joined Westinghouse and worked in the areas of power generation, transmission and electric distribution and was the manager of distribution automation when he left to lead Cannon Technologies. In 2007, Ed was honored with the distinguished engineer award by SDSU. Ed serves on various boards and does some consulting and mentoring for new companies. Ed and his wife Judy have four children and are active in numerous charitable organizations.
Clark Becker
Clark is the CEO of Ridge Run, LLC, an Embedded software product and services company specializing in Linux based consumer products and industrial product software engineering. Ridge Run has recently signed a strategic partnership with Texas Instruments for their open source Linux strategy for their newest generation of OMAP 35x silicon and Streaming media open source Gstreamer framework collaboration for all current Texas Instruments catalog silicon products in DaVinci line. Previous to Ridge Run, Becker was a Senior Vice President and the Chief Technology Officer for Best Buy Co., Inc. where he was responsible for the major systems initiatives which changed the competitive nature of the company (Over $100 million invested). He managed consumer technology labs testing yet-to-be-released products before they went to market. He also oversaw market planning for the technology change in consumer electronics. Clark holds BS/MIS/MBA degrees from the Carlson School of Management.
The semi-finals and finals of Wal-mart’s Better Living Business Plan Challenge are today and tomorrow in Bentonville, Arkansas. The competition focuses on coming up with environmentally-friendly solutions. It is organized in coordination with Net Impact (an international nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire, educate, and equip individuals to use the power of business to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world), which has a chapter at Carlson.
Here is Net Impact’s description of the competition:
The competition challenges students to invent sustainable products or develop sustainable business solutions and present them to a panel of Walmart executives, suppliers, and environmental organizations. In addition to gaining an audience with some of the top business and sustainability leaders in the United States, the winning team will receive $20,000 to invest in their business or product.
For more information, see below:
http://www.netimpact.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=3165
There were some problems downloading the feedback forms that I posted. So I have attached the two forms that we will use today. I re-formatted the individual feedback form so that it fits on two pages, which helps a lot when we are scanning the forms to send for feedback. Please use the re-formatted forms for your feedback.
Marti Nyman is confirmed to speak in our class tomorrow. Operations/Management/Finance presentations will begin on Thursday.The individual and group evaluation sheets have been posted on the website under feedback forms, here.
Here is Marti’s bio from the Minnesota Cup website.
Marti Nyman is a senior business development executive with more than 20 years of success in creating growth for Fortune 500 companies. Having worked across a variety of industries (Energy, Telecommunications, Consumer Retail), Marti has extensive expertise in strategy development, growth opportunity identification, new venture creation (M&A, Joint Ventures, Strategic Alliances) sales and territory management, relationship development and business execution. He has held leadership positions at GE, Ericsson, ADC Telecommunications and Best Buy. Most recently, he responsible for the formation and launch of Best Buy’s Venture Capital practice.
Mr. Nyman holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire, with a minor in Materials Science. He teaches a graduate level course on Corporate Venturing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and is on the Board of Directors at SAVE (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education), as well as the Advisory Board of two startup companies. Mr. Nyman has an extensive network of influential relationships across Venture Capital, Investment Banking and Fortune 500 companies.
I found this nice website that gives voice to real world entrepreneurs. Good resource to make yourself heard as well as to get a sense of good business plan pitches. Go register and pitch your company.
If you or anyone has an idea for renewable energy, you might want to send an application for the business plan competition at the University of Albany.
http://www.neny.org/ContentManager/index.cfm?Step=Display&ContentID=314
On a list serve, someone forwarded this article from the Harvard Business Review blog… seems to be apt based on what we discussed last class. What do you think?
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/04/is_it_ok_for_entrepreneurs_lie.html
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