Students Practice Their Startup Pitches at Fellowship Competition
On the afternoon of Friday, April 22, one our student partners, Startup Exchange (SX), hosted their semi-annual pitch competition and invited community members and the general public to join.
Startup Exchange is the largest entrepreneurship, student-led community at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their mission is to build a passionate community of students interested in entrepreneurship by providing a hub for members to connect, collaborate, and innovate.
Every semester, SX organizes its signature fellowship programs where four to five teams are selected and provided funding and mentorship to help further build their ideas. At the end of each semester, they compete at a final pitch competition to present their work.
As SX’s technology and venue sponsor, the spring Fellowship Pitch Competition was webcasted live from The Clubhouse and streamed to Startup Exchange’s YouTube page. However, nearly 150 attendees showed up in person at Tech Square ATL (TSQATL) Social Club’s 9,000 square foot facility to listen to the pitches of four incredible teams:
Feast
Feast is a food-sharing platform for restaurant-goers to discover and share food with their
friends. Within the network, they’ll engage with a greater community of food lovers – everyone
from the person that never posts on social media to the Yelp-elite foodie that tracks everything
they eat. By combining the community aspect of traditional social media with the utility of
restaurant review platforms, Feast enables restaurant-goers to see where their friends like to eat and share casual food reviews to their networks. Check out their iOS app: www.feastapp.io/download!
Limbus
Many drone controllers are very intricate and look more like mini-computers than they do
remotes. Due to the high barrier to entry of becoming a commercial drone pilot, Limbus offers
complete control of a drone through purely facial and optical movements. Effectively, the user's
head is now the new drone remote controller.
Jobs Marketplace
A peer-to-peer mobile app for college students to buy and sell products and services amongst
each other.
Framed Dating
Framed believes that dating apps – like dating – should be social. Framed creates more exciting
and insightful profiles by letting users’ friends design the dating profiles. Every Framed profile
is authentic and helps users stand out from the crowd.
Of course, no pitch competition would be complete without judges. There to survey, soak in, and scrutinize the ideas, the judges were as follows:
Kathryn Petralia
CEO and Founder of Kabbage, a major company acquired by American Express. Petralia was listed as one of the 100 most powerful women by Forbes.
Lara Hodgson
President and CEO of Now, Hodgson is a recognized speaker from Harvard Business School and a Board Trustee at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Rahul Saxena
Director of Create-X, Georgia Tech's signature startup program, which has produced hundreds of successful startups.
While the judges deliberated, community members and guests devoured complimentary Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell and answered our question of what the most component is when presenting a pitch. Many had several suggestions to share:
Attendees also discussed the presentations and speculated over who the winners would be. Of course, there was also a quick break to do some pull-ups.
After much anticipation, the judges were finally ready to announce the winners. Drum roll, please, for the finalists:
People’s Choice: Limbus – $750
Second Place: Limbus – $500
First Place: Framed Dating – $250
The competition was tough and we personally thought all of the pitches were, well, pitch perfect!
What do you think is the most important component when presenting a pitch? Let us know in the comments below.