Web Technology Entrepreneurship class Day 2

Today was the second day of the Web Technology Entrepreneurship class. If you missed the first day, see it here.

Today we had lots of guests come for our exciting pitch event.  The pitch event was structured as follows:

• First, we discussed about what pitches are and what makes great pitches
• Then, volunteers did some practice pitches for fake companies, with company ideas courtesy of http://itsthisforthat.com/
• After the practice pitches, each person was given $150 of monopoly money to “invest” in the other pitches.
• Then, in randomly-selected order, each student gave their 2 minute pitch, with a cutoff at 2:30. Investors (other students) gave feedback and had the option to invest however much of their $150 they wanted to.
• Lastly, the top 3 winners were announced.

The pitch event was really great, and a handful of great pitches turned out to raise a healthy amount of monopoly investment.

After pitches, we talked a lot about pitch decks, and started actually pitting them together.  We used a pitch deck template from Guy Kawasaki, talked about naming products and companies, and used crunchbase to look up the history of a few web startups.

Here are the slides:

Update: the next class notes are here.