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DFJ Venture Competition

Athleon made it to the finals...pretty cool.  More on this later.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/24893344/

UW Business Plan Comp Press Release

From Here:

Impel NeuroPharma, a drug-delivery technology developed at the University of Washington, has won the $25,000 RealNetworks Grand Prize at the 2008 UW Business Plan Competition.

Impel is a collaboration between John Hoekman, a PhD student in pharmaceutics at the UW, and Michael Hite and Peter Olagunju, evening MBA students at the UW’s Foster School of Business. Hoekman developed a new way to deliver pharmaceutical drugs directly to the brain, resulting in a more effective and efficient means of treating chronic pain, Alzheimer’s and brain cancer. Wishing to commercialize his invention, he approached UW TechTransfer, and was introduced to Hite and Olagunju, who happened to work by day for Seattle biosciences companies and were looking to start something of their own. The resulting founding team earned much more than prize money at the competition.

“We were waiting to see what kind of traction we got,” said Hite. “Winning the competition is a major vote of confidence toward our viability, and we also spoke to several angel investors during this competition who invited us to present to them. It’s just been amazing.”

Its UW Business Plan Competition win earned Impel an invitation to compete in the prestigious DFJ Venture Challenge, May 28 in Silicon Valley. At stake is a $250,000 investment by the hosting venture capital firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Winner of the UW competition’s $10,000 Herbert B. Jones Foundation Second Place Prize was Athleon, a web-based team sports management tool that helps coaches communicate with and prepare their athletes off the field. Athleon was conceived in the Foster School’s Creating a Company course by Brent Lamphier, former captain of the UW’s rugby club and recent business graduate. Foster MBA Dan Rubinsky and Ryan Kosai, a recent grad in electrical engineering, round out the team. Athleon is also competing in the DFJ Venture Challenge.

The Herbert B. Jones Foundation provided additional $5,000 Finalist Prizes to Hybiscus Technologies and Wugaboo Entertainment. Hybiscus (Sam Kim, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering, Lucia Crump Kim, and Edward Stroman) has developed a fundamentally new semiconductor manufacturing process that enables the integration of thousands of micron-scale optical and electronic components onto inexpensive substrates, promising vastly faster connection between computer chips. Wugaboo (Foster MBA students Ryan Bergsman, Daniel Rossi and Katheryn Leonard, UW law student David Ray, education doctoral student Kristen Bergsman and Link Dyrdahl) is a new menagerie of educational toys and books featuring a colourful cast of critters named Jasper, Ruby and Squidget.

The Business Plan Competition also awarded $5,000 each to the purveyors of Best Ideas in several categories: The OVP Venture Partners Best Technology Idea went to Hybiscus Technologies. The Keiretsu Forum Best Consumer Product Idea went to Athleon. The Summit Law Group Best Innovation Idea went to Impel NeuroPharma. The DLA Piper Best Service/Retail Idea went to Energizing Solutions. The Herbert B. Jones Foundation Best Nonprofit/Socially Responsible Idea went to Krochet Kids, a retailer of crocheted hats produced by Ugandan women. And the Heller Ehrman Best Clean Tech Idea went to Voltan Biofuel, a producer of algae-based biodiesel.

The 2008 Business Plan Competition, organized by the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, inspired the submission of 89 student business plans and brought in more than 300 judges from the entrepreneurial community for various rounds of the event.

Since the competition began in 1998, 574 teams have entered, comprised of more than 2,000 student entrepreneurs from more than a dozen universities and colleges around Washington state. A total of $757,000 in “seed funding” has been awarded, helping launch the careers of hundreds of successful entrepreneurs.

At the celebration of this year’s crop of student entrepreneurs, the keynote speech was delivered by Mark Vadon, founder and executive chairman of Blue Nile, the largest online retailer of diamonds and fine jewelry. Vadon recounted how he capitalized on the epiphany that when it comes to buying jewelry, “men are clueless.” He also shared a few hard-earned lessons:

• View your business plan as a playbook, not a sales tool.
• Focus on unmet needs.
• Practice intellectual honesty and rigor.
• Have realistic goals.
• Surround yourself with great people.

“The biggest lesson of all is: don’t fear failure,” Vadon said. “I think everyone here has great ideas. But the fact is that most of you are going to fail. And most of you are going to fail to even raise money. But even if your business fails, you will be successful in terms of pursuing your dreams and learning lessons that no other job can give you.

“What I’m here to tell you tonight is that it’s possible,” he added. “You can take that plan and make it a reality. If you are passionate enough about it, and work hard enough.”

The Business Plan Competition was supported by numerous companies and organizations, most significantly RealNetworks, the Herbert B. Jones Foundation and event partner Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

- - -

At the 2008 UW Business Plan Competition awards banquet, Connie Bourassa-Shaw, director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, announced the launch of the Environmental Innovation Challenge – a new competition beginning in fall 2008. Teams of UW students will compete for a grand prize of $10,000 with business plans aimed at reducing environmental impacts and improving ecological sustainability. The theme for 2008-09 will be water, and the challenge will take place next March. The Environmental Innovation Challenge will be organized by CIE and the Applied Physics Laboratory, with support from the UW Colleges of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, Architecture and Urban Planning, the School of Law and the Program on the Environment.

“I love the idea of a challenge,” said Bourassa-Shaw. “At the UW, there are 75 different programs or centers that focus on the environment. This new challenge will be a way to harness some of that creativity and see if we can move the bar forward by creating companies that provide solutions people want to buy.”

Come Watch Athleon pitch...some more

Has been a crazy week of pitching for us, through the nPost demo event, the UW Business Plan Comp, and finally through coaching for NWEN's Early Stage Investment Forum, the last of the 'open' events we'll be pitching at.  Tickets (I believe) are still available.  We got the last time slot...so please stick around/or feel free to show up later in the day.
http://www.nwen.org

Athleon Game Widgets

For your viewing (and my testing) pleasure:

Athleon Wins MIT Demo

Last Thursday, the MIT Enterprise Forum held a demo event which Athleon was lucky enough to be selected to pitch at.  We gave a five minute talk on our business plan, how we got started, and tips for other entrepreneurs in the audience, then gave a five minute demo.  It went well, we met a lot of great people, and we were lucky enough to be selected the winner of the event. 

From John Cook, venture writer for the Seattle PI:

"Dressed in his UW rugby jersey, Athleon co-founder Brent Lamphier gave a crisp and clear presentation on a new Web site that allows coaches to communicate with athletes about game schedules, work out routines and -- most interestingly -- game film. It was a good pitch, complete with humor. In explaining his reason for bringing on a co-founder, the rugby player noted he needed help because "I get hit in the head a lot." He later described the service as "virtual locker room, with everything but the showers."

Read the rest of the story here.

Athleon Wins Best Pitch

The University of Washington SEBA (Science and Engineering Business Association) put on a Science and Technology Showcase Event sponsored by some VC firms in the area at my old home 'Balmer High Commons' at the UW Business School...and Athleon won best pitch (and a nice deposit for our new bank account)! 

The companies presenting were all very interesting, and all more scientific than Athleon, but as a tech company we fit the bill and had a good time pitching and having conversations with all sorts of interesting people.  The overall winner went to two women who had done research at the University on using saliva instead of blood to preform medical tests.  Makes everyone who hates needles jump for joy. 

Spitting is the new cool thing. (see 23andme, the startup that will map your genes after you send them a bit of your saliva)

Come See Athleon Demo

If you're in the greater Seattle area, the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest is having a Startup Demo on December 13th, 2007, and we were lucky enough to get through the screening and be invited to demo what we're doing at Athleon.

It'll basically be a 5 minute round-up of how we started with a non-tech founder (who got hit in the head a lot), had an idea, found a genius tech guy, and built a product on two college kids budgets.

We'll then demo an Athleon network for 5 minutes.

Here's the link for the event.

Tickets are $25.00, which, outside of the free nPost events, are definitely the cheapest tickets of the Seattle entrepreneur community scene (it amazes me how expensive some entrepreneur events are).

If you can't make it or don't live up here, feel free to send me an email and I can take you through our products.

Athleon Comes From The Greek Word For....

Ever see My Big Fat Greek Wedding?   You probably did.  The father claimed he could take any word and show you that the root of that word is greek.  Athleon is greek...sort of.

Guy Kawasaki has a post about coming up with names, and I figured it was a good jump start to take you through our naming odyssey.

Original name was myfitness, and I hoped i could get myfitness.com from the treadmill company that owns it...then I realized that for what I really wanted to do it was misleading anyways.

I, like many, many companies in my space felt the need to have some sort of straight forward name for people to understand...sports is NOT a market where you can get away with adding vowels (atleast I don't think so, spoooortio.com?)
So, after some more thought, it became teamandfitness.com, primarily because that domain name was available.  $8.00 on godaddy...my first investment in my company. I would keep that name for about three months, until I found my co founder, brought on a designer and started talking about branding and the logo...and realized that what we had just wouldn't work.  If we wanted to build a brand (which we do) we needed to have a name that could actually BE a brand.  As my cofounder put it, we needed a name and a logo you could put on a golf ball if you really wanted to fit in the sports space.

Athleon was the byproduct of about a month of research,  the best of which was me sitting at Barnes and Noble with two greek phrase books, a latin phrase book, an Italian phrase book, and a Hebrew phrase book.  I studied abroad in Greece and like the obvious tie ins with Greece and athletics (a certain shoe company did to), and the greek words encircling anything athletic SOUNDED like American words...so that book won out.

Maybe the man from My Big Fat Greek Wedding was right.

So, in keeping this post relatively short, I continually transfered from a Greek phasebook through 2 online translators and on GoDaddy, trying to see what I could do with a domain.

We ended up with Aethleon, (to be an athlete).  Plus the domain was $8.00

Then...while we were still developing the alpha and doing a boatload of market research, when we told people the name, we had to spell it.

Everyone forgot the first e (and my co founder, looking at  pronunciation, said it actually sounded like eeth-leon, which wasn't athletic sounding).

So, we dropped the e, and Athleon was born.  A domain squatter owns the name, we'll buy it when we need to, but for now athleonsport.com, for $8.00, works out great.

I'll tell you about the logo process sometime later on.