San Luis Obispo – Event Roundup (March, April 2009)
Even though we live in a small community here in San Luis Obispo there are always interesting events taking place. Here are some interesting events taking place in the near future:
Succeeding in a Tough Economy
When: Tuesday March 31st
Where: 780 Bello Street, Pismo Beach
More info: http://www.sloevc.org/events/
Education, Non-profit and Government Job Fair
When: April 2nd 2009 10:00am-4:30pm
Where: Chumash Auditorium Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
More Info:
Monterey Bay Innovation Showcase
When: April 2nd from 4-6pm
Where: Swingtime Cafe, 545 UnionSt., Watsonville, Ca
More Info: http://businessascent.com/
Jeff Hawkins founder of Palm Handspring talk at CalPoly
When: Friday, 4/3/09 12:45-2pm
Where: Chumash Auditorium
More Info: http://www.naesc2009.com/presentations.htm
Clean Tech Open – Mixer
When: April 8th from 5:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Sofitel Hote – Bay Bar, Redwood Shore, Ca
More Info: http://www.cleantechopen.com/app.cgi/events/index
Total Access – Fundraising Series Part 1
When: April 7th from 7:30am-11:00am
Where: 1100 Marsh Road Menlo Park, CA 94025
More Info: http://tinyurl.com/c8cmy7
SLO Tech Brew
When: Mon Apr 13 5pm – Mon Apr 13 6pm
Where:Mother’s Tavern, 725 Higuera St, San Luis Obispo, CA CA 93401
More info: http://tinyurl.com/dhezp7
Earth Day Food and Wine Festival
When: Saturday, April 18
Where: Santa Margarita Ranch
More Info: http://www.vineyardteam.org/events/earthday.php
Good Morning SLO
When: 4/23/2009 from 7:30am to 9:00am
Where: Grace Church Corner of Osos and Pismo St. in San Luis Obispo
More Info: http://tinyurl.com/de2prd
6 Lessons from my Survival Trip
I am back from my 4 day backpacking trip to Yosemite which is a follow up to these two posts here and here. The trip was not particularly fun at all, in fact it was the 4 hardest days of my entire life.
We left on Monday at 4:00am and after a couple food stops, equipment stops, backpacking permits, and a quick scenic drive at the base of Yosemite we finally left for the first hike at 6:00pm down in Badger Pass. The day before we arrived to Yosemite it snowed 30 inches of fresh powder and there was at least 8 feet of snow in the area we were in. The plan was to pack everything we needed for the 4 days we would be out surviving in the wilderness, do a quick hike up to Dewey Point, and set up shelter for that night. Here is a map of Badger Pass.
I really had no idea what I was getting myself into until we started hiking the first trail (remind you that this was my first time backpacking, never being in this climate condition before). The first section of the trail was uphill but groomed and after getting out of breath at this point in the hike I realized I should have prepared a lot more for this trip. The second part of the hike was all un-groomed trail and when we arrived bout a half a mile from the point a very large cloud appeared over the horizon and was moving quickly towards us. When the cloud began to get closer we realized a whiteout was approaching us and we had to get back and make shelter as quick as possible.
Running back to the trail we make it to Summit Meadow and at this point we need to set up camp ASAP. We get the shovel out and start digging down into the snow but because of time constraints we can dig a little less than a foot deep right next to 3 huge redwoods. We quickly make dinner with this small stove we brought (no warmth, no fire) and get to bed as quickly as possible. My feet were soaked in ice water, my beard had frozen water molecules in it, and even worse I realized that I forgot to bring my sleeping bag. Luckily my friend Lindsey saved my life by letting me use her sleeping bag, while she doubled up in another sleeping bag, and it was off to bed for me. My tent I brought didn’t come with a tarp to lay below so I was literally sleeping on the ice sheet below me and I didn’t bring a pillow so I used my half dry fleece pants as a pillow (not a smart idea). And this was only night one.
View from shelter day 1
That night was the most uncomfortable, coldest, wettest, and horrible night of my life. I was praying I didn’t get frostbite or hypothermia since I was literally shaking in coldness that entire night. I awoke to the sound of rainfall hitting my tent and water dripping in my breathing hole into my already cold face. With the sun fully out in the morning the snow on the redwood trees above us was melting fast and dripping down on our campsite. I opened my frost encrusted tent to the redwood rainfall and started to pack up again. It was another survival situation we had to pack up fast or have all of our gear drenched in even more water than it already was.
I could go on for another three pages about the details of my trip but suffice it to say the next 3 days were a bit easier than the 1st night but overall the whole difficult trip was about survival and testing my personal limits. The trip was a huge learning experience for me, especially since it was my first backpacking trip in such harsh conditions, and here are 6 main lessons I took away from this experience:
- The ingenuity of humans is absolutely astounding. It’s almost baffling to believe that humans have created this metal devise that sticks out of the wall and when you turn it fresh hot/cold water comes out. We literally had to boil most of our water from frozen snow, because the rivers were frozen, which took an excruciating amount of time from our day (about 30% of our day).
- The power of small goals (I learned about this from Ben Saunders) When hiking the long uphill distances with a completely sun burnt face and eyes (I forgot to bring sunglasses, another smart move I know) it’s easy to get discouraged and want to give up. There were many instances during the trip where I wanted to give up and just go home but the power of small goals kept me alive. I would look out onto the trail and try to make it to the next tree or next shadow and when I did I would take a 1 second break. I repeated this mental exercise continually until we reached our end destination and this mental exercise was a big reason I stayed alive.
- A major new appreciation for technology, which is related to lesion #1. Common technologies today (houses, grocery stores, waste systems, water systems, etc) that we take for granted literally free us from the everyday basic survival needs of shelter, food, and water. It’s only because of these technologies that allow us as a human race to focus other non-survival activities such as art, music, philosophy, reading, computers, and most educational topics.
- Don’t sweat the small things. It’s very easy to get stuck in the everyday routine of work/school-entertainment-sleep-work/school-entertainment-sleep… and become nit-picky at the small things that annoy you. If you’re in this position I highly suggest you take a survival trip or do something that is far outside of your comfort zone. I guarantee that you will come back a changed person with a much bigger appreciation for what you have in life and the position you are in.
- Survival skills are a very important but under promoted set of skills you should learn and develop. My main skills are advising startup companies, fundraising, business development, and social media all of which are completely useless in a life or death situation in the wilderness. After this trip I realize how ignorant I truly am when it comes to surviving and how much more I need to develop my own personal skills in this area.
- Ignorance is bliss. If I knew what I was getting myself into before leaving for the Yosemite trip I would have never went. Sometimes not knowing what the experience will be like and to quote Larry Gorman, “Just jumping into the deep end of the pool” is the best strategy for getting things done.
If you made it this far enjoy my pictures from the trip! (click any of the pictures for a direct link to the whole photo album)
View from the scenic drive
View from shelter day 2
Yosemite National Park – My Getaway
Its 2am and I am leaving for Yosemite National Park in 2 hours at 4:00 in the morning. We will be hiking a trail called Vendetta which is 2 days hike there and 2 days back. It’s been snowing in Yosemite recently but today the weather condition is clear and the next 5 days of weather looks nice
My hiking trip is an update to my post, How to Survive When the System Breaks Down – Emergency by Neil Strauss, where I said one of things I would do is learn more survival skills. In this trip I’ll be bringing a very minimal amount of gear except an extra waterproof jacket and waterproof gloves which will come in handy while all of the snow in Yosemite is melting.
Since growing up in the major city this is actually my 2nd time camping and my first time hiking so I am hoping for an adventure. I am going with a few eagle scouts and friends from Empower Poly Coalition, so hopefully I will learn a thing or two about using what I can find the wilderness and begin learning how to survive in nature.
I will be gone until Thursday but expect lots of epic pictures when I get back.
2009 Cal Poly Business Plan Competition Photos
In my last post I mentioned switching to Flicker from SmugMug and today I tried using the Flicker sideshow feature with VodPod to embed my flickr slideshow in my blog posts. Lets see if this works:
That worked perfectly! If your trying to embed a flickr album as a slideshow in WordPress check out this really helpful guide http://geekycoder.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/laymans-guide-to-embedding-flickr-slideshow-into-wordpresscom/
As for the pictures these are the pictures from the 2009 Cal Poly Business Plan Competition in San Luis Obispo. And here are some select images I like: (Click on any of the photos for a direct link to the whole album)
And here are the winners of this years competition:
The Battle Between Flickr vs. SmugMug
I just received all of the pictures from the 2009 Cal Poly Business Plan Competition from a professional Cal Poly photographer and I wanted to upload them on a photo sharing site where I could keep the quality of the photos but be able to easily share them on this site and with friends and family. After a quick Google search I came across two popular choices SmugMug and Flickr.
Initially I decided to go with SmugMug because of some reviews I read on Twitter and the very high quality of the photos/slideshows users had on there site. I made my profile http://chrismccann.smugmug.com uploaded pictures and they looked great. The quality was perfect, the presentation of the pictures was clean, and overall I was impressed.
Until I tried adding the photos to my wordpress.com site. I searched forever trying to find the easiest way to embed gallery to this blog with no luck. The closest thing I found was converting the SmugMug gallery to a flash object then embedding that flash object in a post but WordPress.com doesn’t allow flash objects in posts.
After all that time was spend uploading 157 photos with tags and descriptions all into my SmugMug account I was now doubting my first impressions of the site and decided to move to Flickr.
While Flickr doesn’t look as good as SmugMug in terms of the presentation of your photos Flickr is so much more user friendly than SmugMug. Flickr’s photo upload is much faster, it’s a whole lot easier to add tags and write descriptions for multiple pictures at one time, and embedding galleries into posts is a whole lot easier
If you’re a publisher or blog writer on wordpress.com I would highly recommend Flickr over SmugMug simply because it’s much easier to publish your photos and albums from Flickr.
How to be an Angel Investor – AngelConf
I found out about this Angel Investing conference, http://angelconf.org/, the day after the event ended. It was put on by Ycombinator and the conference was about:
Learn about Angel Investing from the Experts
Have you thought about investing in startups, but didn’t know how? You’re not alone. Investing in startups seems mysterious and difficult. How much are you supposed to invest? What legal agreements do you need? Where do you find startups to invest in? How do you pick winners?
AngelConf was designed to answer these questions. Silicon Valley’s most prominent angels have generously agreed to spend an afternoon explaining the secrets of angel investing, from mundane matters like deal terms to questions we all still wonder about, like how to tell which startups will succeed.
The event is free. Please join us!
[Source: angelconf.org]
I was really bummed I just missed the event. With so much entrepreneurial activity going on in San Luis Obispo right now and tentative talks about an informal Angel Group here in town going on, this would have been a perfect event.
But luckily the good people at Justin.tv posted the video of the whole conference online for the world to see for free! Here is part one of the video
The video features Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Andrea Zurek, Paul Graham, and Naval Ravikant.
This video is PERFECT for all cashed out entrepreneurs, especially in San Luis Obispo, thinking about Angel investing but don’t know where to begin and entrepreneurs trying to understand Angel investing and what they are looking for. Below are some selected quotes from each of the speakers sections
Ron Conway
“Why do I like [Angel Investing]? Why have I made 500 angel investments? I don’t like it because its fun. It’s to much work to be fun but I love it because it’s interesting. That is why I angel invest”
“It is hugely interesting to talk to entrepreneurs who are literally telling you the future. Entrepreneurs have crystal balls in there brain that I love reaching in and having them predict the future.”
“The other satisfaction is I get out of it is to watch great companies grow from a seed to a large company, and there is a huge amount of satisfaction out of that. And you learn from the failures as well.”
Attributes that he thinks make a successful angel investor. One who is willing to spend time on it, one who is going to have specific value to add to startups which in turn get you into great deals, be patient, invest in as many [startups] as much as you can, develop a portfolio of companies and be patient, 1/3 of them will go out of business, failure is part of angel investing it is part of the learning process, its as interesting as watching the winners, in your portfolio 1/3 of the startups will loose, 1/3 money back, 1/3 wins..
“Great deal flow + Great due diligence = A great portfolio. Out of that portfolio one of those companies will be a hit.”
“You need to build a referral network of entrepreneurs you invested in and added value to. Don’t kid yourself if you screw one entrepreneur you’re probably screwed for life, because entrepreneurs all talk to each other. Your reputation as an angel is very important.”
“If you are leading a syndicate you need to find other angels to invest in that syndicate the entrepreneur will be very thankful for that. You got to remember that when the company gets traction you the lead angel have got to take that company up to sand hill road and make the introductions to VC’s to get them funded.”
Dave McClure
“Do it [angel invest] for selfish reasons, I hope you are giving back to the entrepreneur but, I would hope that you are desperately interested in that field (industry) and you have something to give back”
“How can you make sure your adding value to the company and how can you make sure to get a good return on your investment, part of your strategy for returns is to identify your area of expertise and promoting that and making sure that’s the thing your giving back”
“It’s important to have a horizontal or vertical category to focus in”
One thing that is important is startup metric and for more information check out his presentation on this topic http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/numbers-not-napkins-simple-startup-metrics-presentation
“In response to diligence and terms Invest in deals where there are other Angels who have done this before and learn from them to get started”
“Your job [as an angel] between the moment you invest before they get to break even or the next funding stage is to make sure they get to that next milestone. Understanding what their [the entrepreneurs] objectives are and whether you think they can get to break-even or weather they need downstream investors to reach break-even making sure you get to the next millstone is what you need to do as an Angel investor. “
Paul Buchheit
He was self described as “The lazy angel” because he is the current CEO of FriendFeed and has limited time.
“Have to keep everything really simple, can’t obsess over every detail and contact”
“You should avoid founders who are going to get caught up on every little detail also. As a startup there are big existential threats, you can’t spend time worrying about details like .5%”
“Asking to sign an NDA is an indicator that the founders have no idea what they are doing”
“Paul has standard docs that he prefers to use in an angel deal but if a more experienced investor has his own terms Paul just accepts whatever their terms are.”
“There are a few basic protections and deal will have like 1x liquidation preference, you get paid back before entrepreneur gets their money”
“As an angel you don’t have a huge amount of leverage, so you rely on the founders to take care of you”
“Why do you want to invest in startups? Obvious answer is you want to make money, but don’t count on making money. You have to used to the idea that all the money you invest will disappear, its good to have low expectations”
“The other reason [to angel invest] is because of the learning experience. If you rephrase everything as a learning experience then it kind of becomes a no loose situation because even if you loose all your money and everything becomes a huge disaster it was a great learning experience. You can learn a lot from startups, and their variety of situations.”
“[Angel investing] is high volatility [endeavor] so you want to invest in a lot of startups; you just need to get started. Instead of [waiting for] the perfect [startup] you just need to get the ball rolling.
Page Mailliard and Carolynn Levy
“The most import thing to ask yourself is why am I excited about this business? What is the real reason I am investing in this? Understand what your are walking into even if you do still want to invest.”
“You want to know. Who are the customers? Do they have contacts with them? If they do have a contract what are the provisions in it?”
“Have the founders been successful before? Do they have a non-compete agreements with there last companies?”
“Is there a missing founder? A lot of times it doesn’t work out between the original founding team and someone decides to leave. And that’s fine but you want know that because what you don’t want to happen is that founder comes back saying he owns a piece of that company. Want to make sure that missing founder signed a release.
Important to let the legal team know of any gut feeling issues because if a person is dishonest it will show up again and you can track that.”
“How do I invest and how do I protect myself? Open source documents, fair to company and protect the Angels.”
http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html here is the link to these documents which include a
1x liquidation preference
Preferred stock includes a class vote in the case of a change of control or merger
Angel investor’s right to participate in future rounds of financing
“[The documents are] less complicated than VC agreements, designed to cut down on time and legal fees”
Paul Graham posted his speech on his website http://www.paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html
Naval Ravikant posted his speech on Venture Hacks
http://venturehacks.com/articles/angel
5 Reasons Why I Use Twitter and the Possibilities
I have been absolutely addicted to Twitter recently thanks to my friend Chad Worth. For everyone who doesn’t know what twitter is:
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.
In plain English:
I signed up for a Twitter account awhile ago but I never used it because I figured who would want to read about what I did all day? And what would I say? I wrote Twitter off as useless and never used it.
In the meantime I began to get more involved in Cal Poly, entrepreneurship, my community San Luis Obispo, and meeting lots of new exciting people. I started publishing an informal email list to my close friends about interesting videos, events, and blog posts I would read about and things were great. Soon after people started hearing about the emails wanting to be included in them, but it ended up becoming so bloated with people. I had to keep track of who like what content, who to BCC, and after awhile it felt like I was just spamming people with emails.
I was debating starting real email newsletter list but this was the point when I was introduced to Twitter again. Twitter was PERFECT for my predicament.
Here are my top 5 reasons for using Twitter
- Twitter allowed me to broadcast out all of the interesting videos, events, and blog posts I come across to all my friends all at once without feeling like an email spammer.
- I linked my Twitter with my Facebook account so now when I write a status update on twitter it automatically broadcasts to my Facebook status.
- Twitter allows me to instantly stay up to date with all of my friends and see what interesting things they are reading and watching
- I can see what’s going on in San Luis Obispo very easily
- I can see what other people think about the issues I am concerned with. For example I just wrote a blog post about the AIG bonus scandal and to see other peoples reaction to this news all I to do was search AIG bonus in Twitter
Check out Evan Williams‘, the CEO of Twitter, TED Video on the possibilities and ways people are already using Twitter
AIG Divvies out $163 Million Dollars in Bonuses WTF?!
I know this blog is about entrepreneurship and I keep talking about the economy but it was announced yesterday that AIG is paying out $165 million dollars in bonuses.
WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
[Source New York Times]
I understand that AIG wants to keep their “talent” at the company, I understand that AIG wants to be able to recruit new talent with their 
compensation plans, I understand the free market system and being able to set your own compensation plan… But when the government owns the MAJORITY of your failing company that is sucking our taxpayer money by the BILLIONS you should NOT be paying out millions of dollars in bonuses to the executive that have completely FAILED.
Howard Lindzon sums it up nicely:
I was reading yesterday that AIG has approved $163 million in bonuses. I mean that seems fair because according to their attorney, they were promised..get this….CONTRACTUALLY.
Let’s see here, the government owns 80 percent of your ponzi shithole company and we are allowing bonuses because of a contract. It would be cheaper to kill every lawyer and executive associated with the bonuses at this point. The company does not need to retain anybody. It needs to be unwound and quickly.
[Source http://howardlindzon.com/?p=4080]
How to Survive When the System Breaks Down – Emergency by Neil Strauss
Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Domestic crackdowns. Economic collapse. Riots. Wars. Disease. Starvation.
I just finished reading Neil Strauss’s new book titled, Emergency. Neil, who was best known as the New York Times bestseller of “The Game“, has done a complete 180 degree change from focusing on picking up women to now learning how to survive world crises.
Emergency is about Neil Strauss’s 3 year adventure where learned from the top survivalists, tax-dodgers, billionaire businessmen, and the government itself about how to survive when the system breaks down. The book is broken up into five parts:
- Orientation
- Five Steps
- Escape
- Survive
- Rescue.
The half of the book set the stage by explaining why he thinks our society could break down at any moment, how this could happen (economic collapse, terrorist attacks, ecological damage, natural disasters, bank failures, etc), examples of how people act during these times, and why he and many others have lost faith in the system. The first two sections are Ok, not great, but it does lay out the reasons why Strauss is writing this book.
The second have of the book is where all of the good stuff comes in. Neil recounts his conversations with the top experts on how to acquire multiple passports, hiding and moving your assets, crossing borders, protect yourself from litigation, survival skills, and many more useful tactics.
Here is an excerpt from Emergency taken from Tim Ferriss’s, the author of Four Hour Work Week, blog.
Lesson 59 – Iceland is the New Caribbean
Maybe it was when Bear Stearns became the first brokerage house to be rescued by the government since the Great Depression.
Maybe it was when IndyMac became the fifth American bank to fail in recent months.
Maybe it was when the government gave customs agents authority to confiscate, copy, and analyze any laptop or data storage device brought across the border.
…
Maybe it was the unshakable sense that the worst was still to come.
But I was no longer alone.
It was a hot summer, and pessimism hung thick in the air. Most people I talked to felt as if they were inching closer to some darkness they couldn’t understand, because they’d never experienced it before and didn’t know what it held.
…
Even Spencer’s housemate Howard, who had once made fun of us for taking precautionary measures, was now looking into Caribbean islands. As it turned out, he would beat all of us there when his company collapsed and he had to hide from possible indictment.
“I’m so glad we started preparing ahead,” Spencer told me over dinner at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying in Los Angeles.
Having struck out with the Swiss, I took Spencer’s advice and opened an account with a Canadian bank that had a branch in St. Kitts. Since both Canada and St. Kitts are part of the British Commonwealth, he’d explained, I would have easy access to my money if anything happened in America. Unfortunately, in the process, I discovered that keeping international accounts secret is now illegal: the IRS requires Americans with over $10,000 in foreign accounts to file an annual report disclosing not just the amount of money and the banks it’s kept in, but the account numbers.
Meanwhile, Spencer was moving forward with his ten-year plan. He started an Internet business in Singapore, enabling him to open a private banking account in the country, which he claimed was fast becoming the new Switzerland. Though he hadn’t gotten his St. Kitts passport yet either, Spencer had done more research into buying an island.
“I’m looking at islands in the north, around Iceland, because no one will think of looking for anyone there,” Spencer said, his thick lips spreading into a self-satisfied smile. “If I can get some other B people [billionaires] to go there with me, we can build underground homes and use geothermal energy.”
“What about your submarine?”
“It’s a great way to move between islands undetected, but we’re running out of time. We need to move faster. This is only the beginning.”
“How bad do you think it’s going to get?” Spencer seemed to understand the economy at a higher level than most people did, perhaps because he knew so many of the people who ran it.
“I don’t think the whole country’s going to collapse, but we’re looking at the worst economic disaster in America since the Great Depression. What I’m also concerned about is the increase in violent crime that’s going to accompany this.”
Everywhere I went that summer, the demon of Just in Case seemed to follow me, growling in my ear louder than it ever had, its jaws terrifyingly close to my jugular. I’d learned so much, changed so much, tested myself so much. It now was time to stop preparing, turn around, and face the demon-and my fears-head on.
And a musician would lead me there.
The book is fantastic and Strauss’s writing style uses the perfect amount of detail that gives a good insight on how he is preparing himself for a crisis but doesn’t overload you with facts to you figure it out the rest on your own and create your own personal path. My top five key takeaways from the book, in no particular order, are:
- If there is a major disaster you cannot expect any assistance for at least 3 to 5 days, maybe longer. The government plans for this and the emergency agencies actually recommend learning basic survival skills.
- The best way to hide your assets is by buying collectibles, watches, precious metals, or items that store value and can be easily transported to another location.
- In addition to having an emergency plan in your current location, survivalists call this Bugging In, you need to have an emergency escape plan if the social contract totally breaks down, survivalists call this Bugging Out.
- Fear is the driving force of most conspiracy theories, survivalists, police forces, government intervention, radicals, and fear feeds both side of people who install fear and combat fear. And the best way to eliminate fear is to be prepared and use this knowledge and experience for constructive purposes.
- People actually cryogenically freeze themselves?! I always thought this was just a science fiction fantasy for movies but apparently not.
And my personal key action points after reading this book are
- Take an EMT class. Here is a class they offer in San Luis Obispo
- Learn more about surviving in the wilderness during my camping trip this week
- Take a firearm training and safety class. Here is an firearm organization in San Luis Obispo
I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how to become more prepared for emergency and crisis situations.
Bill Trammel – Cal Poly Business Plan Competition: The Wrap-Up
My good friend Bill Trammel founder of Stealth Design here in San Luis Obispo just wrote up a post about the Cal Poly Business Plan Competition:
Last month, we finished up the Ray Scherr Business Plan Competition. The Ray Scherr Business Plan competition is put on with the help of SIFE, Cal Poly, and Ray Scherr, the founder of Guitar Center. The cash pot was $10,000, divvied up among 3 winners. We were stoked to be among the finalists, and had a great time at the last pitch session. I wish I’d taken pictures or video, but we were so amped we forgot to. We ended up not making it to the last round, but I got to stick around and see who won. The winners were as follows:
1st Place: Brian Riley and Andrew Ouellet with an anti-lock brake for bicycles. Brilliant use of mechanical power.
Community Winner: Santasti, with their excellent palate-cleansing beverage. These guys gave an incredible pitch. Very inspiring. You can buy packs online now on their site.
3rd Place: Grindz, a chewing tobacco substitute.
A big thanks to Chris McCann and SIFE for their help in putting this competition together. I got to meet some really cool people, and we had a lot of fun putting our prototype and pitch together.
[Link: Cal Poly Business Plan Competition Wrap Up]
I also included a couple pictures. This one will be featured in this months Cal Poly Magazine:
- From left to right: Prashant Vanka, Chris McCann, Nicole Chamberlain, Patrick Pezet, Turel Karaman, Brian Riley Bottom: Jon York, Andrew Ouellet
And here is a picture of the winners of the Cal Poly Business Plan Competition:
From left to right: Andrew Macaluso, Nicole Chamberlai, Brian Riley, Chris McCann, Andrew Ouellet, Matthew Canepa, Patrick Pezet
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