venture well

2010 application open by the 15th!

Stay tuned

funding for People, Prosperity and the Planet

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is launching their 7th Annual P3 Awards: A National Student Design Competition for Sustainability Focusing on People, Prosperity and the Planet.

P3 supports R&D and design solutions to real world challenges involving the overall sustainability of human society. Areas of interest include:  Energy, Built Environment, Materials and Chemicals, Water, and Agriculture.

$850K expected to be available, up to 46 awards anticipated.  Responses due 1/5/10.  For more info http://epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2010/2010_p3.html

Postalcode Lottery at it again: €500,000 bplan competition

Venture Well Cohort member Ecovative Design took away €500,000 (about US$700,000) in the PostalCode Lottery Green Challenge. Deadline for submissions for this year is July 31. LINK

Investors' Circle deadline for entrepreneurs is July 31!

Investors' Circle is an amazing group of early stage angel and institutional investors committed to the sort of "good for the world" ventures that Venture Well teams exemplify. And Venture Well is a member. Deadline for submission of your application as an entrepreneur for presentation of your ventures at the November conference in Washington DC is July 31! LINK.

Congrats to Husk Power for nailing it!

Husk Power Systems, member of the 2009 Venture Well Cohort, NAILS it at the DFJ + Cisco Global Business Plan Competition. $250k! LINK

tool for calculating the effect of investors

Here's an interesting tool for calculating the effect of rounds of equity investment. Take a look! (LINK)

Important video on the subject of "disruption"

and what industries are prime for disruption.

 

Fred Wilson's slide who, here: LINK

Congrats to Venture Well Cohort member Ecovative

Very nice press in Popular Science (LINK)

€500,000 prize open for business

Ecovative Design, one of the members of the 2009 Venture Well Cohort, won the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge prize last year. The applications are open. Go for it!

LINK

Startups in 13 Sentences

From the Dean that is Paul Graham. I especially love #9. You have to go to the original to understand what he means by these sentences: LINK.

1. Pick good cofounders.

2. Launch fast.

3. Let your idea evolve.

4. Understand your users.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.

7. You make what you measure.

8. Spend little.

9. Get ramen profitable.

10. Avoid distractions.

11. Don't get demoralized.

12. Don't give up.

13. Deals fall through.

Imagine Cup: Deadline January 22!

If you're waiting for word as to whether we've selected your venture to be part of Venture Well for 2009--or if you have broader interest in this blog--make sure you check out Microsoft's Imagine Cup.

The deadline for qualifying round submissions is next Thursday, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:59pm PST.

There are four simple steps to getting an entry submitted for the qualifying round:

1. as a participant of the Imagine Cup.
2. Create your team
3. Download and complete the Submission templates!
4. Submit your entry!

"thank you for making it so much easier ... to commute to the unemployment office"

"If we spend $1 trillion on a stimulus and just get better highways and bridges — and not a new Google, Apple, Intel or Microsoft — your kids will thank you for making it so much easier for them to commute to the unemployment office or mediocre jobs." Friedman: LINK

A "retweet: the Nine Inch Nails Theory of Entrepreneurship

Here's a really fun post from the Social Entrepreneurship blog about the Nine Inch Nails Theory of Entrepreneurship. Fun and good! This link is to the post; below is a Nine Inch Nails video. LINK

Innovation or infrastructure?

While we sort through Venture Well applications, here's something to ponder: should the new Obama administration be focused on innovation or infrastructure? Or somehow should they be combined? Elliot Spitzer . . . yes, never thought we'd be quoting him this soon . . . has a thoughtful piece in SLATE in which he argues, in part, for the support of robotics competitions in high schools.

In education—just as much a part of our infrastructure as bridges and roads—here is a small investment that is one of my favorites: Provide funding for robotics teams at every school. If you ever want to see intellectual competition in the arena that matters today—technological wizardry—visit the robotics competitions that now exist in some schools. Make these competitions as universal as football. Make it cool to design the next cutting-edge video game or iPod. LINK

What do you think about the innovation vs. infrastructure question? And do robotics competitions lead to cutting-edge technology? What's your experience of such competitions? What could the new administration do to spur collegiate innovation?

Dreamers and Doers

Important article about college student driven innovation in the New York Times today. Take a look: LINK.

Venture Well applications

We received LOTS of amazing applications for Venture Well on December 19. Thank you! We're reviewing them now and will be back to all of you soon.

You might have seen the post on the Green VC blog (LINK) about the deadline extended to January 2. We were late getting to Green VC and we wanted to offer anyone reading that blog who hadn't otherwise heard about Venture Well the opportunity get their application in. Rest assured, the effort that you put in to get your application in by December 19 does count! Thank you.

(And subscribe to Green VC. It's a good one!)

Investors Circle

Investors' Circle has officially opened its 2009 Spring Conference Call For Social Ventures: Present your deal to the largest and oldest network of early-stage investors dedicated to funding mission-driven companies. Application Deadline: January 15th, 2009. A few more comments after the jump, cribbed from Investors' Circle.

Struggling with the Venture Well deadline?

Struggling to get your Venture Well application in today? E-mail us if you have questions or concerns or have a good reason for needing a little more time. You can find Joseph's contact information here: LINK.

This Guy Kawasaki post definitely makes you think

Take a look: LINK. What do his images and comments mean to you and your business?

Reaching your customer

The previous post showed the YouTube video from First Round Capital. While some people might say, "How condescending for a venture firm to get their portfolio companies to dance," what that video really represents is a great marketing piece. I'm sure it's going viral to First Round's potential customers, and will deliver great results for them in terms of more deal flow: "What a cool video; I want First Round to be an investor in my company."

A key question (the key question?) for early stage ventures is, "How do I reach my customers?" Nice to know that your investors have that down!

Antidote to current climate from First Round Capital

World market potential

We've been asked, "Is Venture Well a Bottom of the Pyramid oriented program?"

Venture Well is NOT a BoP oriented program. It's agnostic on the subject.

Venture Well: Submission Tips

Venture Well deadline is fast approaching! I've been corresponding with many of you by e-mail since several of you have asked about the expectations for the financial grid, here's a public response.

MIT Student Designed Airplane Car

If you were a professor and some students came to you and said they wanted to create a company to produce an airplane-car, what would you say?

Mass High Tech + Press Release

Venture Well hit Mass High Tech today. Press release after the jump. LINK to the story.

Wikibook on Getting Started as an Entrepreneur

We (www.nciia.org) have just posted to Wikibooks our Getting Started as an Entrepreneur. Have at it: feedback and edits welcome! LINK

LLC vs. C Corp

We have received numerous queries about why Venture Well, in the investments that we intend to do, is only investing in "C" corporations and not "LLCs". Here are two links to posts on the subject from noted VC and blogger, Brad Feld: LINK and LINK.

Note that for the 2009 Venture Well Cohort, you can apply regardless of what kind of entity you are (LLC, non-profit, not incorporated -- whatever). It's just that if we do make an investment in a for-profit, we'll need it to be a C Corp (LINK to our investment criteria). You can find the link to the application for the 2009 Venture Well Cohort on our Venture Well homepage.

(To add confusion: more on "B" Corporations in a later post! But you can ignore that comment for now.)

Why do we think collegiate entrepreneurship can change the world?

We couldn't have said it better than Al Gore in the closing paragraphs of his New York Times opinion piece this weekend.

Press release for Venture Well

We've formally launched Venture Well with the press release that appears after the jump. We're honored to have two great entrepreneurs give us quotes for the release: Paul Hudnut of Colorado State University and Envirofit (LINK) and Bart Houlahan of B Corporation (LINK). Update: Press release will be released on November 14.

NCIIA E-Team wins 500,000 Euro Prize!

We are thrilled to report that an E-Team from the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance--the parent of the Venture Well program--has won a 500,000 Euro prize in the PICNIC business plan competition.

Ecovative Design has placed first in the Dutch Postcode Lottery funded business plan competition (LINK).

When they were still students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York they received a $15,000 E-Team grant from the NCIIA (LINK to E-Team grants information).

It is exactly this sort of progress in which Venture Well expects to help create for university venture teams emerging from the academic environment and transitioning to the business world.