RIT 48 - create an entrepreneurial business in 48 hours
March 14, 2010
Starting this Friday RIT students will have the opportunity to create an entrepreneurial web-based business in 48 hours. RIT 48 has selected this blog author to be a judge for this highly competitive and interesting competition. So what is RIT48? They are glad you asked: RIT48 aims to bring together students from various disciplines to pitch, plan, develop and launch a web startup in one weekend— or, as the name suggests, 48 hours. An intense, energy fueled, entrepreneurial event, RIT48 was designed to showcase the innovative and creative spirit of RIT students while offering the opportunity to learn and meet new people. Always had a cool idea for a web startup but never the time or resources to make it happen? RIT48 is for you. You can form a team, develop your idea, and launch a web startup to the world in a mere 48 hours. We’ll bring the coffee.
The competition is open to Alumi, Students and Faculty, but all development of the website or business plan must be completed during the 48 hours of the competition.
I’m excited to say I’ve been selected to judge this awesome event and I’m really looking forward to working with my fellow Judges - Susan Beebe (SM expert), Aaron Newman (SM2/Techrigy), and Liz Lawley (Director of the Lab for Social Computing at RIT) on this task. The top winning team will receive $600. Here is the schedule for the 2 days:
Friday (9AM-All Night): Introductions, Planning, Developing
Saturday (10am-7pm): Testing, Tweaking, Refining, Presenting
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Good luck to the team members and may the best team win!
RIT presents serial entrepreneur and investor Terry Matthews
December 10, 2009
‘Serial Entrepreneur’ Terry Matthews to Speak at RIT Dec. 11
Matthews to offer his secrets on how to launch successful businesses
Terry Matthews, the founder of more than 60 telecommunications, information technology and software companies, will discuss how to create successful new ventures during a 3 p.m. talk on Friday December 11th at Rochester Institute of Technology’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences Auditorium.
The event is free and open to the public.
Matthews is the chairman of Wesley Clover, a private equity firm that describes itself as being in the business of building businesses. Matthews and his team at Wesley Clover utilize their extensive experiences in the technology realm to identify gaps in the marketplace and launch new enterprises to fill them. Wesley Clover reaches out to either recent college graduates or those at the tail end of their academic career to lead the charge, offering training and mentoring along the way.
In the past two years, seven recent RIT graduates have formed companies for Wesley Clover.
“Terry Matthews is what I call a serial entrepreneur,” says Richard DeMartino, director of RIT’s Albert J. Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “His passion is empowering and coaching young entrepreneurs in building businesses. The insight he will offer in his presentation will be invaluable for anyone looking to launch their own business.”
Entrepreneurial Profile - Jorsek Software
April 30, 2009
Company name: Jorsek LLC
Principals: Patrick Bosek, Casey Jordan
Website: www.Jorsek.com
Contact: contact@jorsek.com
Industry Focus: Web-based Publishing Software
# of employees: 3
Startup Stage: Boot strapped to a completed product, currently entering market and evaluating other uses for our technology platform
Lee Drake: Every entrepreneur learns early that a careful concise, one paragraph elevator speech describing their product or service is a key component of success. What is your elevator speech:
Jorsek has developed document and website editing software which is intuitive and fun to use while ensuring everything stays beautiful by automating all design elements. We allow all aspects of a functional website to be incorporated into one cohesive whole; blogging, marketing materials, contact forms, product listings and general business information all easy to edit and grow. Our goal is to empower businesses of all sizes to better present them selves to more people on the Internet.
Lee Drake: What was the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in building your entrepreneurial business and how did you overcome it?
Our biggest challenge thus far has been moving from being a small R&D firm to a product based company. When we started Jorsek we just two software developers attempting to pushing the limits of web based technology. Through that process, we created a piece of software which truly improves on the current state of the art and has value to many industries. So that has left us many options and very limited capacity to evaluate them. To solve this problem Casey and I have just started talking to people, throwing out ideas and seeing what resonates with them. As we get more feed back, we continually hone our different concepts to be more appealing to their intended audience. We’ve been doing this for about 3-4 months now, and I feel we are starting to narrow in on a few very attractive targets.
Lee Drake: What do you anticipate the next biggest challenge will be?
Another challenge along the same lines has been conveying our technology to people, which sounds strange to say since our technology is primarily a document editor, and we all use document editors everyday. The reason this is an issue is because we have taken an extremely complicated technical problem (allowing true presentation format editing of XML) and made it appear very simple, to the point that many people struggle to believe our technology isn’t common place. We have had success overcoming this hurdle by listening more to each individual and trying to show them only the portions of our software that speak to them.
Lee Drake: What has been the most pleasurable surprise you’ve had as you go down the road of an entrepreneurial startup?
As odd as this is going to sound, the coming together of our software. Since the stuff we were working on was so undocumented, there was a period where we weren’t sure what we were going to get. Then about 5 months ago it became clear everything was all going to come together, and our software was really going to work. This was a great sigh of relief, or as much as it could be with out having decided how we were intending to sell it.
Lee Drake: What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to build space ships. And I think I’ll still get that chance.
Lee Drake: If you could give just one piece of advice to someone with a new entrepreneurial idea, what would it be?
If you’re going to do it, go for it 100%. Understand entrepreneurship is a life decision, not a career decision.
Thank you to Pat and Casey for your profile! If any other Rochester Entrepreneurial firms would like me to do a profile on the, please contact me via the website.
Check out my post on entrepreneur-blog
April 2, 2009
Check out my latest update on entrepreneur-blog.os-cubed.com on why it’s a bad idea to assume end-users are stupid.
