On May 3rd the best of New York University ‘s entrepreneurship was on display at the finals of the annual Entrepreneurs Challenge in which three teams of entrepreneurs shared $200,000 in prize money. Over the course of eight months 500 plus applicants in 178 teams were winnowed down to twelve team finalists in three competitive categories: Technology Venture, Social Venture and New Venture. The applicant pool drew from both students and alumni of NYU’s fourteen schools.
Moderated by Luke Williams, Executive Director of the Berkley Entrepreneurship Center for Innovation, teams made their presentations to a select panel of highly distinguished judges with knowledge of the areas they were judging. This included Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, one of five judges for the Technology Competition; Jill Nagle of Bridgespan, a non-profit strategy consulting group who was one of four judges for the Social Venture Competition and William R. Berkley founder of W.R. Berkley Corporation, a Fortune 500 property casualty insurance holding company and Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Stern School of Business who was one of five judges for the New Venture Competition. As Luke Williams noted, “the decision of the judges seems to be harder and harder each year as venture ideas and their business plans have continually improved since the Entrepreneurs Challenge was started”.
The winners and prize money for each Category were:
¦New Venture Competition
Smart Vision Labs co-founded by NYU Stern alumnus Marc Albanese (MBA ’08) and Stern student Yaopeng Zhou (MBA ’14) $75,000
¦Social Venture Competition
Kinvolved founded by Miriam Altman, Barrie Charney Golden and Alexandra Meis $50,000
¦Technology Venture Competition
Oculogica, NYU Stern alumnus Stephan Ogilvie , Stern MBA Robert Ritlop and Uzma Samadani, MD, PhD, FACS, FAANS of the NYU School of Medicine Faculty $50,000.
Databetes, Doug Kanter and Ryan Viglizzo, students in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and D’Arcy Saum $25,000.
The Berkley Entrepreneurship Center for Innovation is one of the largest accelerator programs in the world. The mission of the Center is to “identify, nurture and unleash entrepreneurial thinking at NYU. In addition to providing students with “real-world, hands-on startup experiences”, alumni, faculty and staff are given a platform to leverage their professional experience to launch new ventures. Programs include: venture competitions, conferences, workshops, help desks, mentoring and networking opportunities.
