A reminder that Lance Cassidy of Dxlab and startup weekend will visit us tomorrow to critique startup weekend pitches. Elevator pitches are a very useful part of your computer science career as the industry becomes less monolithic, more nimble.
Some advice from Lance:
For the 60 second fire pitches we really want to focus on articulating the problem and not necessarily the solution. They'll have 60 seconds to say who they are, what problem they want to solve, and how they want to solve it. There's many public speaking things students can work on like good posture, conversational tone, not walking around a lot etc. There are many ways to pitch - it really depends on what students feel most comfortable with. The only way to find this out is through practice. Usually the first time you pitch it goes for 2 to 3 minutes and then it takes some time to shave off extra bloat until you can get to 60 seconds. I strongly recommend they practice getting it down to 60 seconds because we'll have to cut them off :)
Here's some of the judging criteria for the final presentations. These are different than what's expected for the 60 seconds pitches but it can give students a good sense of what type of ideas they're looking for. Let me know if you have any other questions!
The Startup Weekend judging criteria is broken up into three sections. Teams are judged according to the following 4 criteria (weighed equally):
- Business Model
Can this idea make money? Is there positive customer growth or revenue? Is there a customer acquisition / rollout strategy? Has a revenue model been defined and is it realistic? Is the idea/team ready for capital and execution? Would you invest in this company at this point? - Customer Validation
Did the team identify customers (demographic, location etc)? Did the team get out and talk to customers? What is the value proposition to customers? What channels of communication are used? Product/Market fit? - Technical – Execution
Is there a functional product (e.g.in the case of an app, did they build one)? Were architecture diagrams and API signatures included? Which services did they integrate with? How much of the product is running on a real server with non-sample data? - Design – Execution
Does it have a professional look and feel? Does it deliver a compelling and captivating user experience? Is it memorable? What key insights were gathered over the weekend to go in this creative direction?
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