and a few more pics

thank yous all around

some photographs of semi-finalist contenders

thank you to everyone who took part!

pictures from semi-final presentations

Thank you to everyone who took part in the semi-final rounds. We were all impressed by the quality of the business plans, and congratulations to the 8 finalists. (see plan summaries on the bplan.berkeley.edu website)

here are some photos of the judges (real VCs) carefully considering the plans in the final deliberations.

important information for qualifying teams!

BPlan Teams –

For the first time, The Haas Business Plan competition is teaming up with EECS to give semifinalists the unique opportunity to present their posters to a group of 28 venture capitalists at the BEARS conference (The Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium). While some of you may feel that it is too early to present your plan to VCs at this time, the VCs are aware that the plans may be preliminary and we encourage you to seize the opportunity to get the early exposure. This exposure may net you information on an unknown competitor, input on a market opportunity you are not aware of, or a mentor for your plan. All semifinalists are expected to present posters at the BEARs conference during lunch (from 1:00 - 2:00PM) on February 15th. For information about the event itself, see http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/BEARS/. All teams need to do is bring a poster, and everything else will be supplied (easels, foam board to attach the posters to, and supplies to attach the posters to foam board). Details regarding the poster format, etc. will follow.

Currently we have 28 VCs from the following 22 firms:

3i Technology Partners

Adams Capital Management

Azure Capital Partners

Claremont Creek Venture Capital

Diamondhead Ventures

DoCoMo Capital, Inc.

First Round Ventures

Foundation Capital

Horizon Ventures

Hull and Stevenson

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV)

New Enterprise Associates (NEA)

Newbury Ventures

Onset Ventures

Saints Venture Capital

Sand Hill Angels

Shasta Ventures

Siemens TTB

Tallwood Venture Capital

US Venture Partners

X/Seed Capital

a potential template

Here's a suggested template for the executive summary due later this month:

Business Plan Format

Executive Summary (1-3 pages)

• Your business idea or concept
• The target market and size
• The target customers
• Your competitive advantage
• Barriers to entry
• Estimated year of breakeven profitability
• Three years of estimated revenues and net income
• Your funding requirements
1. Business Overview
   • Company description and business model
   • Value proposition- financial
   • Current status
   • Current or committed funding and all funding sources
2. The Market Opportunity (the problem, the customer's pain)
   • Why is this such a great idea? Define the problem, describe the pain
   • Competitive analysis (how the problem is not being solved by competitors)
3. Market Solution
   • Product or service
   • Description of a working model or prototype, if appropriate
   • How you will remove the pain, solve the problem
   • Ability to create barriers to entry
4. The Market
   • Identification of customer(s)
   • Market size, analysis and forecast
   • Industry analysis and forecast
5. Management Team
   • Founders and key management
   • Industry experience, education
6. Financial Analysis
   • Outline overall financial model with detailed projections through Year 3
   • including pro forma cash flow and budget analysis
   • Other analysis, as appropriate (i.e. break even analysis)
   • Discuss assumptions and capital requirements
7. Funding request

Interview with Ashish Sahu, bplan organizer

The UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition is entirely student run, by students in the Haas School of Business. Students manage all aspects of the competition - everything from the events surrounding the competition, to securing sponsorship funding, to finding the judges & mentors, among other things. We're going to try to "get to know" some of the individuals who are putting this thing together. Like many of you, they have entrepreneurial aspirations. A big thanks to our first interviewee, Ashish Sahu, from the MBA class of 2008.


Ashish, tell us about your background?

Early in my career, I worked as a Consultant at Infosys and Motorola across India and the US. The last 3 yrs at a start up in San Francisco. Though I have mostly been involved in High-level decision making, I am an Engineer at heart....always trying to find innovative solutions to problems. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Information Systems. The MBA from Haas will be the "one ring that will rule them all". I am also an active volunteer at non-profit organizations located in the Bay Area.

What kind of exposure do you have to entrepreneurship, in your past? / What sparked your interest in it?

I worked as a product manager in a start up during the last 3 years. As a young man, I had always hoped to work for a start up in the Heart of Silicon Valley. So, joining ZoneLabs was a culmination of a dream. However, due to the dot-com bust, working for a start-up was not as glamorous as I had imagined. The company was located in a warehouse in a seedy San Francisco neighborhood with a homeless shelter across the street and crackheads lying by the entrance. But the company itself was doing pretty well. The company led by the CEO, a high school drop-out, the COO, another entrepreneur and an able team of 20 people - suddenly experienced a spurt of growth. When it was finally acquired for $300 million in 2004, the CEO walked out of the door with almost $30 million bucks.

The morale of the story was that it could have been me walking out of the door with the big moolah. Having come so close, I decided to throw more money at my quest to get rich by racking up a big debt to pay for my MBA.

Tell us about what you're doing for the bplan; how has it been going so far?

At the Mentorship & Events committee, we think of ourselves as the match.com of the BPlan competition. Our vision is to help you find the perfect team, an understanding mentor and resources to win the competition. We try to achieve this by a mix of events and workshops.

Usually there's a strong MBA turnout at the entrepreneurship events. This year, we have been trying to rope in more engineers from across Cal. While trying to do it, we realized that Berkeley has a very fragmented engineering department...we've had to bribe engineers using pizza and coke as bait.

We also regularly host "Best Practices" workshops with the Lester Center. Additionally, we have added new events like the Idea Workshop and the latest - an event labelled "Rags to Riches: Winning a Business Plan competition". This exciting new addition brings the winners of last year competition " Aurora BioFuels" and "CellASIC" to talk to aspiring BPlan winners on how to win a BPlan competition.

Another significant step we took this year was to invite Haas Undergrads to become part of the organizing committee. It has been a huge success so far thanks to active contributions from all our young "BPlan Executives" - Alison, Belinda, Ben, Oscar, Naaman, Suana and Wendy.

Finally, I would like to add that the success of any event depends on the people behind it. We have an awesome team of people in the BPlan committee and I am really excited to be a part of it.

Any personal goals you have, entrepreneurship-related?

Like many other aspiring entrepreneurs, I have tons of ideas...but as many already know, the key lies in execution. My goal in the next year is to rub shoulders with as many entrepreneurs as possible to reduce my inertia towards starting my own company.

speaker series

On Monday, the 27th, we had a great opportunity to learn from two high profile figures in entrepreneurship - Donna Novitsky from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Penny Herscher from firstRain, Inc., discussed marketing strategy and sales in a start-up context.


Having been a part of an entrepreneurial venture in my past life, I could really relate to what Donna was talking about regarding marketing strategy for a start-up. In our situation, we had little service /experience to speak of...but a ton of sales and lots of claims. It was always a matter of sell, sell, sell, and let's try to figure it out how to do it later. As a project manager at the time, I never thought this made a lot of sense. We won't go into all of the madness that ensued as a result too.

At the same time, there's definitely another side to this - how some start-ups are so concerned about getting the product or service right that they never sell anything. (Donna discussed this too, as a common flaw) In that regard, I guess we did, at least, secure a steady revenue stream that paid for my salary. My sense is that this depends on how much cash you can access.

The point is, in a start-up, everything is tough, and nothing works perfectly. A big company already has a market, reputation, strategies, and customers...at a start-up, there is often close to nothing. So that's why understanding how to efficiently and effectively establish a marketing plan is so absolutely critical. And anybody who's been through the storm knows that it's easier said than done...
But next time around, I came away feeling like it could be done better. And a lot of these lessons can be applied to big companies wanting to be more flexible and faster.

Other things that were discussed that were poignant:
- don't take on early-beta customers unless you are 80% sure that they are going to actually be paying customers. (make tough choices)
- talk to customers first (30 customers in 3 months, as a good benchmark) Focusing on listening, to really understand cusotmer needs.
- selling consulting projects (not scalable)
- ramping development before market is proven (great product, no market / costly)
- product insufficiently defined

Just in case, you are not sure what I'm talking about, this was a talk that was given at the Haas school as part of the Best Practices Series. The Best Practices Series brings the top practitioners from Berkeley and the Silicon Valley Community to speak about the practical aspects of entrepreneurial activity.