Project Olympus Show-and-Tell
A few years ago I was lucky enough to attend a Moot Corp Competition (with a CMU team winning!). This is among the nation’s premier business start-up competitions, with one of the highlights being a series of rapid-fire “elevator pitches” for new start-ups. One of the great things about Moot Corp, besides being fun, is that it exposes techies to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs to techies. The network created by this exposure can be incredibly powerful.
Of course, it’s not easy to compete in a business-plan competition. For one thing, it means that you need to have a mature enough idea that you can write, um, a business plan. So what about ideas that are in a more embryonic stage of development? In its “show-and-tell” events, our department’s Project Olympus is providing a similar form of exposure for both mature and, interestingly, less mature concepts for high-tech start-ups, and with a particular emphasis on the Pittsburgh region. I went to my second show-and-tell a couple of days ago. The series of short (about 10-minute) talks/pitches was both interesting and, just as important, fun.
Before I get into some highlights, a bit of background about Project Olympus. One of the main goals, as expressed by the Project’s director, Lenore Blum, is to build “a climate, culture, and community to enable talent and ideas to grow in the Pittsburgh region.” Olympus does a lot of things, but perhaps the two most important are: (1) provide “pre-angel” funds to help people develop their ideas into potential business opportunities, and (2) organize networking events (like the show-and-tells) to bring researchers and business people together. In a sense, Olympus fills the gap between traditional incubation operations and business training.
Now, back to the show-and-tell itself. It was held in the Collaborative Innovation Center lecture hall. Attendance was very good, with just about every seat filled and lots of people standing, mostly with people from the local business community but also a good representation from faculty and students. I found all of the talks to be interesting, with one of the highlights for me being the pitch by our own faculty member, Jesse Schell, and his partner, Shanna Tellerman, on their startup, Sim Ops Studios. They have a cool 3D virtual-world web-mashup concept for social networking sites. Watching my son use the Internet, I think this could be big. Also entertaining, as always, was a brief introduction to robot soccer by Manuela Veloso. Other talks included a presentation from Todd Waits (Semiotic Technologies) on his online training start-up, Brian Wirtz (Ask Bright) on his “find an expert” concept, and Alan Braverman (Geni.com) on his family-tree social networking site.
With all the great people and ideas here at Carnegie Mellon, it’s no surprise that there is a lot of entrepreneurial thinking on campus. A short talk at the show-and-tell by the Tepper School’s Zeynep Tolon described her study of CMU entrepreneurial activity. The last two fiscal years, for example, showed an average of a dozen spin-off companies each year by faculty and an unknown number of spin-offs by students. (Student spin-offs aren’t tracked as carefully by the university, because sometimes they are able to own the intellectual property they develop.) While this is roughly half the rate of spin-off activity found at Stanford, when our size (both in the number of people and amount of research funding) and amount of local investment capital is taken into account, our numbers actually look quite good.
Zeynep explained that one of the factors is the university’s liberal IP policy for spin-offs, which allows faculty to take ideas and start companies with them, the only obligation being to grant the university a small (roughly 5%) equity stake in the start-up. This so-called “5% go in peace” policy is both painless and easy for just about anyone to understand.
I think we can all be proud of these things. However, in my view, not everything is peachy keen. Access to investment capital and, just as importantly, savvy start-up expertise, to enable a company to start-up effectively in Pittsburgh, continues to be limited. And with faculty and students wanting more and more to stay in Pittsburgh, this is growing into a bigger problem. Conversely, the regional entrepreneurial network finds it strangely difficult to get “quality time” with the researchers and research ideas on our campus.
Building up the regional network and binding it to our campus activities is one of the major goals of Project Olympus. I think it is off to a great start.
Peter Lee @ December 14, 2007