MIT 100K Competition

I had the chance to attend the Semi-Final ceremony for the MIT 100K Business Plan Contest, which has outgrown its name and actually has prizes in the 100's of thousands across the various tracks.

This huge event in on of the large halls on the MIT campus featured a keynote speach from Johnathan Seelig the co-founder of Akamai and now managing director of Globespan. Interestingly he's also on the board of Zipcar, the founder Robin we met earlier in the week.

It was a great event from a number of perspectives. Firstly it was huge, with a good few hundred in attendance, showing the calibre of the competition and how popular the hard working volanteer students who run the event have made it.

Also Johnathan was a great speaker, and interestingly he re-presented his original pitch for Akamai from 10 years previous when he had entered the then 10K competition. Although a finalist, he didn't win the competition, and was the first to admit the flaws in his presenation. It was interesting to see how the business model has evolved, and how their original plans changed over time.

Unfortunately it will be a while until competitions such as Blueprint reach this size and stature, but at least they are heading in the right direction.

MIT

We were welcomed by the MIT crowd, and it was good to hear from current students about their experiences at Sloan. They certainly work hard, and I was staggered to find out how much they get involved with activities in and outside of the school. It was a great atmosphere at MIT, and the social activities were great.

The 100K was a huge event and I’m glad that I attended the ceremony. The scale of the venture was a big shock and it was great to hear how involved the students are in the organization. To hear Jonathan Seelig, the founder of Akamai, one of the biggest internet services speak was a great opportunity. Especially to hear how far he had come since he had entered the then 10K competition 10 years ago. For Jonathan to give the same presentation that he gave at the beginning of his company was very interesting because it was obvious how much has changed since then, although he always has aspirations to be a large company, I’m just not sure he thought quite so large.

It was a shame that the evening pizza event wasn’t more organized and hosted at a better venue with more of the students available to meet with us. It seemed that the event clashed with two very high profile events for Sloan students, which limited its attendance greatly.