Over the past few months, Stern has seen its profile in the venture capital community improve dramatically. Over two weekends in March and April, Stern first hosted the Northeast Regional Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) and then captured second place in the international finals at UNC. The Stern members of the winning team were Gadi Bashvitz, Keshava Dasarathy, Ben Hurst, Sallil Kalayanarooj, and Ken Wang.

During the weekend of March 9-11, eight different schools sent teams to NYU Stern to compete in the 2006 Northeast Regional Venture Capital Investment Competition. For 48 hours, teams from Harvard, MIT, London Business School, Wharton, Yale, Babson, Dartmouth, and Columbia evaluated five different companies. They received the business plans on Thursday evening, and spent a sleepless night reading all five plans and doing background research on each.
On Friday, the entrepreneurs from Metaphor Solutions, Violin Technologies, Phoenix S&T, Enpresence, and SignStorey came and gave their investment presentations. Following the pitches, each team was given 15 minutes for a Q&A session with each entrepreneur, where they probed deeply into their questions about the company.

Following the due diligence sessions, the teams once again worked late into the early morning as they made their investment decisions. After choosing one out of the five companies, the teams put together a 6-minute presentation supporting their recommendation. These presentations were made to a panel of 17 real venture capitalists including representatives from Bessemer Ventures, Silicon Alley Venture Partners, Euclid SR, and Oncore Capital, among others.

At the end, Harvard’s team took home the top prize of $3000 for the northeast region. MIT came in second, securing the $2000 prize, and London Business School won the Entrepreneurs Choice Award of $1000. The event was a great success, with Patrick Vernon, the national coordinator, calling it "The best regional competition ever hosted".

Less than a month later, Stern sent its championship team from the Southeast Regional VCIC to compete against Harvard, MIT, and six other leading graduate business schools at the international finals at UNC on April 6-8, 2006. The other competitors were Cambridge, University of Washington, Michigan, Colorado, USC, and Duke. Following the same format as the regional competitions, Stern’s team took home second place, behind the University of Washington. Michigan followed in third place, and Colorado won the entrepreneurs prize.
The second place finish came after a heart-stopping moment during the presentations. As part of the competition, teams are required to e-mail their presentation slides to the organizers. However, after beginning the presentation, the team realized that we had e-mailed the wrong set of slides! We had to immediately switch away from our rehearsed-to-perfection presentation, and do the presentation with no visual aids! Fortunately, the hours of practice paid off, and we were able to pull it off, even with no PowerPoint slides.

The background of the Stern team was invaluable in winning second place. Covering a wide array of industry and functional experience, the team was able to bring some expertise to bear on each of the companies in the final competition. The competition included two software companies, a material science opportunity, a medical diagnostics firm, and a pharmaceutical company, so being able to speak intelligently on a range of industries was critical. With backgrounds in investment banking, entrepreneurship, consulting, media, pharmaceuticals, technology and medical devices, our team enjoyed an advantage over most others.
The Venture Capital Investment Competition has been one my most rewarding activities while at Stern. I highly recommend it for any student interested in Venture Capital, either as a career, or as a potential entrepreneur. Stern has already been awarded next year’s Northeast Regional, so organizers are needed to continue Stern’s success. In addition, since each participant is limited to one year of competition, we will need five new competitors for next year’s team.

-Keshava Dasarthy