According to an article on The Hub, a team of graduate students from the Carey Business School will compete in the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) on Friday, February 12. VCIC is one of the world’s largest business school competitions, featuring teams from more than 70 business schools from around the world.
The Hopkins team features Andrew Hinton and Preeti Singh from the Design Leadership program, Dushyant Gadhia and Sumner Webster from the Global MBA program and Yu Dai from the flexible MBA program. They placed second in the Mid-Atlantic regional event last month, which qualified them for tomorrow competition at Boston University. There they will face off with teams from Cornell, Georgetown, Miami, Notre Dame and Virginia. After this round, the global finals will be held in April at UNC Chapel Hill’s Keenan-Flagler Business School.
According to the VCIC, the competition is NOT a business plan competition. It is an entirely unique event in which MBA students emulate the life of VCs. The “VCIC Experience” is a WIN-WIN-WIN convergence of three elite groups: top MBA students, visionary entrepreneurs and successful VCs, each of whom has much to learn from the others.
Instead, real start-up companies pitch their business plans to the student teams, who act as investors. Team members conduct interviews, gathering as much information about the start-ups as possible in order to make informed investment decisions. They then negotiate a deal based on their assessments of the business plans and projected success of the companies.
Judges scoring each team on their intelligence-gathering and investment strategy. A vote by the panel of judges determines the winner and a round-robin follow-up allows student teams to ask for feedback on their strategies. Judges for the Boston round include: Kevin Connors, founder of Spray Venture Partners; John Murphy from Hyperplane Venture Capital; Margaret Kohin, senior vice president of business development for eMagin; Jennifer Powell, founder of The Excellent Writers; and Don Nelson, co-founder and managing director of Harken Capital, among others.