

Business Plan Competitions - _pius
http://steveblank.com/2009/05/07/business-plan-competitions-2/

======
BenS
Steve overlooks an important part of the competition - the opportunity to win
non-dilutive financing in a time where fundraising is hard.

~~~
skmurphy
The only non-dilutive financing is customer revenue.

~~~
lacker
Not true. Some competitions (like Facebook's last fbfund competition) just
give you money.

------
skmurphy
Steve had added another item to a the list of things customers don't ask: "Can
I see you business plan?" "Can I see your college grades/transcript?" "Is this
patented? How many patents do you have?"

Much of the advice entrepreneurs get for fund raising is at best orthogonal if
not antithetical to actually getting customers.

------
puzzle-out
Major problem with the business plan competitions I've been to is the IP. One
Conversation went: presenter: its a great idea. judge: so what is it.
presenter: i can't really say, just trust me. On the flip side, when a friend
of mine won a competition he then couldn't patent it, as he had declared it in
a room full of people. As a result, most of the more open competitions tend to
focus on quirky ideas, that could not be patented anyhow. I often find they
are little more than pr exercises to lift the profile of the entrepreneurs
society and/or business school, not bad in itself, i guess, but I always get
more of an institutional feel about them.

------
dmarques1
Interesting article...

HN: if you could completely rebuild business plan competitions, what would
they look like? Would it still even have a business plan involved?

~~~
alain94040
It would look pretty much like YC actually:

You have 3 months. Go build something that people want. Figure it out as you
go. Iterate, refine.

To be fair, you have to think of business plan competitions as a teaching tool
for students. You don't tell a CS student to go out and write an operating
system on day 1. You teach them structure first.

The same can be said with those competitions. It's a way to force students to
think about all the issues of starting a business or launching a product,
without actually doing it.

Personally, I'm on the DIY camp. I learn better by doing. But you need a bit
of both.

