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Friday, November 16, 2007

Rice / CMU Business Plan competitions

I'm all excited now. Team Greenbucks finally made its decision - to some extent driven by the bucks but just the option to go to one or both of the two most prestigious of Business Plan competitions is something we just could not afford to pass.

The USF competition was also pretty attractive with the option of going to the one state I hadn't visited in US being a pretty good alternative. But the grand prize of 100K USD at Rice was way too good to pass. I know this involves a lot more competition than USF - but then one thing the three months here has taught me is that the human spirit just longs for challenges. Throw it a challenge and believe in it and you'll make it or at least get really really close. We'll give it our best shot and the one fear I had that my team was not as committed to BP was washed away today with the belief I saw in going for Rice and really the effort we all put in during the internal case competition.

Before you guys start going ga'ga over the 100K figure, that's just money to help build the product growth. We probably won't get even a penny out of it. :-) Rice has a lot of small prizes like 3-4K USD. I don't think any product can be promoted with just that kind of money. So winning 5th or 7th prize might be better than winning first prize here.

Last night was crazy. Suddenly my team members start talking about Case Competitions and how they'd be the better option with chances of success being better and everything. Had a tough time convincing them. Finally decided that it was best to give it some time. Prof Nason finally helped convince my team this afternoon that BP wasn't really that much of an effort since we were all anyway going to take the Business Plan course.

And then the climax with one team member keen on USF and the others keen on RICE/CMU after we'd sent our preference to the Professor. It really should be fine since Rice was the second choice there too.

GOOOOOOO GREENBUCKS!!! Thanks Wolf, Carrie and David for being such wonderful team-mates.

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