November 19, 2004
Going Up? McCombs MBAs Win San Francisco Elevator Pitch
Contest
By Erica Grieder
|
|||||||
Imagine you are an entrepreneur, struggling to find backing for your new venture. One day, you enter an elevator and walk right into a potential investor. At that point, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations will get you nowhere. An innovative idea, a sound business model, reams of market research—these are nothing without a good pitch. If you had all of twenty stories to make a case for your business, could you sway the investor?
Five MBA students at the McCombs School of Business can confidently answer that question in the affirmative. Earlier this month, Kent Allison, Rick Bosworth, Brien Davis, Meredith McQuilkin and Constans Salcedo won the Elevator Pitch competition at the University of San Francisco’s 2004 International Business Plan Competition. Their company, LoDrag, uses a university-developed technology that reduces the viscous drag on submerged surfaces, such as ship hulls.
As a result, ships can go further on less fuel. “The industrial shipping industry spends over $8 billion each year on fuel,” explains Bosworth. “Preliminary data indicates that LoDrag can save them up to 15% on their fuel budgets.”
The nature of their company is relatively specialized, but the team was able to make its value apparent to a panel of judges—and in only ninety seconds—in peril of being “gonged” if they overran that time limit.
The Elevator Pitch was a special contest within the overall USF competition, which had a competitive field of more than 150 entrants from 100 universities in 18 countries. Only 25 teams made it to the semi-finals in San Francisco April 1-3, and six, including LoDrag moved on to the finals. LoDrag ultimately placed as a finalist in the overall competition, winning a total of $2000 in prize money.
“Simply competing against such capable peers was an honor,” says Bosworth, “and gaining exposure to the Bay Area venture capitalist community was an outstanding opportunity to network.”
Prior to this competition, LoDrag won second place at this year’s campus round of the MOOT CORP® competition at The University of Texas at Austin.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
