TiE Entrepreneur's Pitchfest

TiE Boston held its first ever TiE Entrepreneur’s Pitch-fest on Thursday, January 19, 2012. This cross-functional event, hosted by TiE-Angels and TiE Launchpad, was an invitation only event with 6 entrepreneurs pitching their businesses to a panel of judges which included TiE Angels and TiE Charter Members. The judging panel was each given an amount of $100,000 in fake investment money and asked to use this money to ‘invest’ in one or more start ups. The intent of the event was to help entrepreneurs refine their pitch as well as to receive feedback from the judges on their pitches

A variety of industry sectors were represented at the Picthfest including Energy, IT, Healthcare, Legal, Marketing, and Education. Our presenters were: 

Vikram Aggarwal, President of EnergySage – a platform offering clean energy information and advice for homeowners and small-commercial property owners
Sanjay Mazumder, CEO of River Meadow Networks – a server migration business
Krishna Gazula, President  & CEO of iHASMD - Integrated Healthcare Access – a comprehensive tele-health platform
Pallavi Singh, President & Founder of Beacon IP, LLC – a patent research services company
Tushneem Dharmagadda, CEO, Mobinett interactive – a social discovery platform around events, and
Gaurav Dhy, LearnFunGo – a technology training platform

 The Panel of Judges included TiE-Boston Charter Members: Kartik Shah, Co-Founder & VP Engineering of Skyscape, Mark Haddad, Partner at Foley-Hoag, Satish Tadikonda, President of Virtify Inc, Veera Anantha, Director of Engineering at Motorola, and Venkat Kolluri, CEO of Chitika Inc.

Some of the key messages and feedback provided by the judges:

• Identify the key value propositions to the customer and the investor and make sure to clearly indicate the difference during the pitch
• Understand that there may be very successful, viable businesses but they may still not be venture/angel investable businesses
• The CEO is the company’s most important salesman and seeking funding to establish a sales presence for any reason other than to scale is a red flag

The participating entrepreneurs were very appreciative of the feedback and constructive criticism. The entrepreneurs viewed the exercise as a very useful pause in their work day to stepback from the daily business operations and to look at the larger picture.

TiE Entrepreneur Pitchfest provided entrepreneurs an opportunity to distill their idea, refine their pitch, and get feedback on their business from experienced entrepreneurs & investors.

TiE-Angels is an angel investment group of TiE Charter Members. The group aims to provide entrepreneurs and start-ups with seed capital and support to help them get to the next level.

TiE Launchpad is a series workshops developed for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. These workshops, held throughout the year, take entrepreneurs through the full life-cycle of a venture start-up to help them transform their idea into an entrepreneurial venture.