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George Washington University to Host Entrepreneur Networking Event
Aveya Creative, DC’s first branding and marketing agency dedicated serving entrepreneurs, has announced BrandNew ’14—an interactive networking and discussion event that brings new entrepreneurs together with top startup execs, MBA professors and marketing experts—on April 18, 2014 at The George Washington University School of Business. Continue reading…
Babson Launches Accelerator for Female Entrepreneurs
Babson College’s Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL) has launched a business accelerator for female entrepreneurs called the Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab to support startup and early-stage ventures. The program is a residency program that is open to Babson female undergraduates, graduates, and alumni.
The WIN Lab meets weekly throughout the school year, and it is divided into two series for the Fall and Spring Semester. Series I, which meets from September to December, will encourage female entrepreneurs to develop market-ready prototypes. Series II, which meets from January to April, will help entrepreneurs develop funding and launch strategies, and also focus on developing entrepreneurial teams. The WIN lab program will provide students with business pitch practice, networking activities, access to bank loans, introductions to angel investors, marketing strategies, basics of financial management and accounting, and other services and lessons essential to beginning entrepreneurs.
The program was developed with the help of Sharon Kan, an Entrepreneur in Residence at Babson. In her career, she has built four startups with the help of an MIT group: Demantra Inc., c-Ark, Zoomix, and Tikatok. All four startups were aquired by larger companies. Sharon Kan will be part of the Win Lab coaching team.
The inaugural group of entrepreneurs in the WIN Lab program consists of sixteen Babson women from nine countries. The WIN Lab program began in early September with a two day retreat in which students learned about goal setting, team composition, and design thinking.
Potential MBA students at Babson who are interested in participating in the WIN Lab program next year should contact Heatherjean MacNeil at hmacneil@babson.edu for more information.
Stern Launches 2013-2014 Entrepreneurs Challenge
This past Wednesday, New York University’s Stern School of Business launched its annual $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge at the official Kick-Off celebration. The competition is open to all NYU students, researchers, alumni, and faculty regardless of their previous business background or startup experience. The challenge consists of three competitions: a New Venture Competition encouraging students to take their ideas from concept to market, a Social Venture Competition for businesses that find innovative ways to tackle social problems, and a Technology Venture Competition to accelerate existing early stage businesses and encourage the creation of new businesses based on NYU technologies.
As its name suggests, the prize pool for the challenge totals $200,000. The New Venture and Technology Venture competitions award a total of $75,000 each in cash prizes, while the Social Venture competition awards a total of $50,000.
Over the course of the eight month competition, competing teams receive individualized coaching from executives, investors, and seasoned entrepreneurs. The competitors also receive training assistance, with lessons in how to figure out which product is the right product for your market, build a solid business model, assemble a team of founders, pitch to investors, and create a solid financial plan.
Previous winners of Stern’s entrepreneurship challenge have achieved some success in the business world. Madecasse, the 2007-2008 Social Venture Competition winner, was named one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies by FastCompany for starting a company that manufactures chocolate in Madagascar. The 2008-2009 New Venture Competition winner Butter Beans, Inc. was featured in Crain’s New York Business in a story about entrepreneurs using awards to their company’s advantage.
Sloan Student CEO Elad Shoushan Wants to Make GMAT Prep Mobile
Elad Shoushan is a rising second year MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He doesn’t quite fit the typical MBA student profile: born in Israel, Shoushan played professional basketball there before coming to Sloan. And since arriving at the school he’s differentiated himself from his peers in another respect: he’s already founded his own company, LTG Exam Prep Platform, which has raked in over 1,000 users and multiple awards since its launch.
Shoushan’s company currently offers just one product, Prep4GMAT, a mobile friendly GMAT preparation app that utilizes a text-processing technology to label and categorize GMAT questions, allowing users to home in on particular concepts. “This is LTG’s technological advantage over other companies,” Shoushan told Sloan in a recent interview. This unique technology, combined with the product’s mobile usability and relatively affordable price of $29.99 (MetroMBA readers may be aware that GMAT prep courses typically run far more than that, occasionally to the tune of thousands of dollars) have allowed Shoushan to successfully pitch his venture at startup competitions like the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition and MassChallenge 2013, where he was selected as a semi-finalist and finalist, respectively.
“Many business lessons that I’ve learned at MIT Sloan (sales, marketing, financial forecasting, etc.) were quickly applied to my company,” he told Sloan, noting that the true advantage of being a student entrepreneur is having the ability to continually apply classroom lessons to a real company. More, LTG’s geographically far-flung team–which has key members based in Israel, India, China and Cambridge–is a testament to the truly global experience student entrepreneurs can gain at top MBA programs.
