Feeling a really strong entrepreneurial energy in New Haven and at Yale especially in the past few months. Here’s one example: Thursday night there were three separate events on campus about entrepreneurship.
I spoke at the Yale College Seminar “Venture Capital, the Start-Up, and the Law” taught by Stephanie Lim. Told the story about Higher One and how we handled legal issues in creating and growing the company. Touched on incorporation, fundraising, etc.
Simultaneously, Kam and Jeff were speaking at HackYale about the SeeClickFix story and how to use Ruby on Rails to build great websites fast.
And YES was hosting a pitch competition judged by Barry Nalebuff. I was able to catch the tail-end of it and ended up helping with the judging. There were definitely some create pitches and Barry commented on the improvement in quality since last year. He said 4 or 5 of this years pitches could have one last year. That was great to hear!
The three finalists at the pitch competition were Cognection with etailer optimization software, a wristband that reminds healthcare professionals to wash their hands and a spontaneous real-time Meetup mobile app. Great passion and pitches shown. In the end we gave the iPad to the real-time Meetup app in part on grounds of feasibility for students to execute on it and potential ability for rapid adoption and scale. The wristband is exciting from a lives-saved perspective and I hope to see it in the marketplace soon!
