Kyle Jensen

In case you didn’t read it Steve Blank doesn’t like business plan competitions. I like ‘em.

Obviously (if you’ve been in a start-up) he’s right that the plan will not survive first contact with customers, but [in my much more narrow experience] the competitions, and even the plans, do have some redeeming qualities. Specifically, they’re a comfortable toe-in-the-entrepreneurship-water for students accustomed to exams, grades, and the clear-cut metrics of academia.

I was personally involved with two start-ups that competed in the MIT $100k: Agrivida and Semprus Biosciences. (I co-founded Agrivida and Semprus was based in-part on some technology I invented in grad school.) For both companies, the competition was really fun and a good excuse to get all our ideas down onto paper and into a slide deck. We could not have done the iterative “pivot” process Steve suggests because we didn’t have any customer contact. (Time-to-market in the cleantech and medical device spaces can easily be six years.)

Both companies raised VC funding (Agrivida from Kleiner-Perkins), both have hit major technical milestones, and both are well on their way to changing the world. I don’t feel like the business plan competitions were a waste of time. I feel like they were fun, useful, and a convenient excuse to codify our thoughts.