At the end of the semi-final round of presentations for the Randall Family Big Idea Competition, 100+ teams of dedicated students where whittled down to 50 and were to be making the journey through the next month of planning and strategy to, ultimately, present to final round judges on March 21st, 2019. As part of their introduction to the next phase of competition, students were matched with mentors during this year’s Meet Your Mentor and Finalist Bootcamp event.
During opening remarks with Babs Carryer (Director, Big Idea Center) and Big Idea Center entrepreneurs in residence, teams were given information imperative to their success in the competition and beyond. Once oriented, the students were then matched with their mentors, experts in similar fields throughout the city of Pittsburgh.
What followed was an evening of networking and the sharing of information and expertise. Kyle Wyche, member of team Easy CPR, had this to say about his experience, “What I learned today is that there are a lot of different things to know about building your business. One of the main things is understanding who your customers really are because, while we may have a product or a great idea or some amazing concept, if we don’t have the customers, the people who are going to take it into market, our concept is not going to move anywhere. While we are focusing a lot on understanding what our product is we need to make sure have talked to a lot of different people so that we have gained different insight and different perspectives on how our product can influence the people that we want to help.”
The finalist ideas covered a variety of topics. There were teams exploring the field of medical devices as well as those who were trying to enter the field of social innovation in order to, potentially, make the world a better place. Team CodHer() spent the competition exploring and building a digital application with the goal of teaching young women the mechanics of computer coding. Their mentor, Erica Peterson, was chosen as a match due to her expertise in a similar concept as she is the founder of Moms Can: Code, a program that teaches mothers how to code online. When discussing her experience as a mentor, Peterson said, “I am preparing them for the competition by really diving deep into questions about customer discovery, customer acquisition, and go-to-market strategy so that they have a really great understanding of who their customer is and can answer those questions with confidence. Also, that will inform other questions the judges might have about how their going to make revenue.”
Bobby Zappala, a managing partner at Localize Capital Management, was also chose as a mentor. “As a mentor here, my goal is to help these students really understand how to take their idea and progress it along the process of iterating it to a real, commercialize-able business. I can say that, as a process, [Meet Your Mentor] is really phenomenal. There are a lot of people that I have seen here in the room tonight, mentors and entrepreneurs in residence and executives in residence, that Pitt has corralled in front of these students and it is amazing exposure. These are hardly kids, they are young adults with really fantastic ideas and they are getting exposure to some people who have really been out there in the real world trying to solve problems … It is a much more practical way of applying your knowledge and I think its phenomenal. Ultimately, the exciting thing is that you have the added benefit that some of these ideas are really going to turn into viable businesses,” Zappala stated when asked about his involvement in the process.
As the evening concluded, teams were given the opportunity to sign up for office hours with experts in the fields of law and the Federal Drug Administration. Additionally, they were instructed to continue to word with their matched mentor, as well as the Big Idea Center entrepreneurs in residence, as they continued in their journey towards the $25,000 grand prize. At the end of the day, students would receive as much as they gave to the competition, but the resources provided during the Meet Your Mentor and Finalist Bootcamp would continue to be of the utmost value to teams who continued to utilize them throughout the next month and into the foreseeable future of their potential businesses.