The DukeGEN Angel Pitch Event
Several months back tripchi participated in a Duke Global Entrepreneurship Network DukeGEN Angel Pitch event in NYC (Chandra graduated class of 2004). The event was hosted at AppNexus in MidTown (28 West 23rd Street 4th Floor), who provided a great space as well as dinner and drinks. If you haven’t heard about AppNexus, the company provides trading solutions and marketplaces for internet advertising.
The DukeGEN Angel Pitch Lineup
There was a great lineup of Duke entrepreneurs at DukeGEN Angel Pitch who pitched later in the evening, while the first part of the evening was spent networking and listening to Sonny Caberwal of Bond talk about founding his company. Incidentally I later went on to actually use the Bond product to write a customized handwritten letter – pretty cool!
For the DukeGEN Angel Pitch section, each of these companies had 6 minutes to make their presentation and then answer some questions from the panel of judges.
- 4:30 – Tom & Jenny’s Candy Company
- 4:40 – RocketBolt
- 4:50 – CrowdTunes
- 5:00 – tripchi
- 5:10 – Turnout
The DukeGEN Angel Pitch Pitch
tripchi as usual was overly ambitious and tried to bite off a presentation on the Airports 2.0 vision AND a demo in the 6 minutes. We all can agree this was an epic fail and certainly will chalk it up to learning experience. Probably should have cut the demo (too many technical problems can go wrong) and also spent less time on the vision.
Here’s a view from the stage at the audience during the pitches, very engaged and in sponge-mode.
And here’s a view from YouTube social media, where a friend of mine captured my pitch live-streaming and Facebooked it out.
The DukeGEN Angel Pitch Results
We especially enjoyed the judges/panelists questions at DukeGEN Angel Pitch which pointed out to us that we need to present the mall opportunity business case upfront since that may be the more interesting one to investors.
The panelists also gave great feedback to the entrepreneurs after deliberating on the pitches and awarding the prize of a free Angel consultation to Turnout.
The panelists were:
- Thomas Lehrman ’95, MasterStreet
- Matt Witheiler ’03, Flybridge Capital Partners
- Lisa Blau ’97
- Chris LaSala ’98, Google
- Ryan Spoon ’03, ESPN, formerly with Polaris
- Howie Lerman ’02, Yext
- Geoff Kanter ’89, Martin Kanter
And, of course if you couldn’t make it to the DukeGEN Angel Pitch, it was recorded – feel free to watch it here!