Stern was awarded the Entrepreneur’s Prize in our first year participating in the Venture Capital Investment Competition. The Stern Private Equity Club (SPEC) selected and sponsored a team that consisted of MBA2 Baljeet Singh and MBA1s Joseph Fernandez, Eric Futoran, Jamie Lin, and Atin Sharma. The VCIC is the nation’s premier strategy competition for venture minded and entrepreneurial MBA students. The competition is run by UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and is structured like the NCAA Basketball March Madness tournament. There are 4 regional sites (West, Central, Southeast, and Northeast) and two wild-card sites in which a total of 44 business schools compete for a national championship and over $50,000 in cash prizes. Stern competed in the Northeast region which was held at Babson College against students from Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon.

The competition began on Thursday night with the receipt of 4 real business plans that students analyzed overnight. The next day students had a chance to hear a group presentation from the 4 entrepreneurs and to conduct a 15 minute meeting with the entrepreneurs. Teams then prepared an executive summary that listed key factors that led to their investment decisions for each of the presenting companies including positive reasons to invest, major risks and critical milestones for each company. Teams then choose one company to invest in and drafted a term sheet. On Saturday, teams presented their recommendations to a panel of Venture Capitalists that judged each team based on their interaction with the entrepreneurs, their proposed term sheet, and their presentation.

MIT and Harvard were awarded 1st and 2nd place respectively but Stern was awarded the Entrepreneur’s award, which was voted on by the entrepreneurs who selected the team that they were most impressed with. Several judges complemented the Stern team on a thorough and complete analysis and some of the entrepreneurs have continued to keep in contact with Stern team members for business advice. While we are proud of our Entrepreneur’s prize and plaque (and the $1,000 that came with it), we have our sights set on winning it all next year. The result also highlights the depth of Private Equity/Venture Capital knowledge and interest present in the school and augurs well for future years. We had great time in Boston and in the words of the Governor of California, "We'll be back."

-Joseph Fernandez
MBA 1