Is Your Business Plan Outrageous?

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Judges and prize winners from the 2010 A. Lorne Weil Outrageous Business Plan Competition.

Nick Friend ’11 and his mates, Chris Beardsley and Russell Greenberg, had a dilemma: How to create the perfect, portable cocktail for tailgating? After tinkering with a design (they share a background in architecture and design at Yale), they came up with the Sidecar. It is a liquid-filled disposable sleeve (with room for advertising) that fits over a soda can. Every sip from the enhanced can produces the perfect blend of can and sleeve contents. Think a portable Jack-and-Coke in less than three seconds. Their idea came in first place — with an award of $7,000 — at the Entrepreneurship Program’s A. Lorne Weil Outrageous Business Plan Competition, which took place on April 16, 2010.

More than a dozen teams of first- and second-year students and their business partners participated in the competition. The second-place cash prize of $4,500 went to Ben Appenzeller ’10 and his plan for a virtual gift card distributor called Gift Helix. Julia Levy ’11 received $1,500 for her third-place winning plan to create a private-public partnership with New York City to encourage people to drink more tap water and reduce the consumption of plastic water bottles.

Honorable mentions went to Jeremy Miller ’10 and his plan for FSA-Store.com, an online commerce site offering products eligible under Flexible Spending Account programs, and Srikanth Nimmagadda ’11 for a mobile app called Cougar Hunter, a GPS-based application to help interested men and women find each other on-the-go.

The competition included an elevator pitch segment, in which students were asked to give their best short-form pitch. Watch select segments from other participants in the competition:



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