Business plan contest opens in McCosh 64

When Dennis Specht, founder and chairman of the network software company dynamicsoft, speaks on campus tonight, part of his audience should be especially attentive. Many of the students that will attend the kickoff event of Princeton's Fourth Annual Business Plan Contest are hoping to win part of $10,000 in prize money by excelling in ways in which Specht has proved himself unusually successful.

Specht is scheduled to speak in McCosh 64 at 8 p.m. tonight about his experiences as an entrepreneur and successful businessman. And that is precisely what organizers of the contest and its parent organization, the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, want University students to start considering more seriously.

"I think [entrepreneurship] is an interesting career path that a lot of Princeton students don't think about," said Phil Michaelson '03, the director of this year's Business Plan Contest.

Perhaps because the prospect of being an entrepreneur seems less financially secure than more conventional career paths like investment banking or consulting or simply because students do not have much exposure to the entrepreneurship world, Michaelson said he feels it is not a typical career route for Princeton graduates.

"The best time to start is when you are young, without kids and a mortgage to worry about," he said.

The business plan contest is designed to "give [students] the tools to become entrepreneurs" and to encourage students to "try to think along lines that aren't traditional" about their futures, said Entrepreneurship Club president Adrienne Clark '02.

Those tools include the challenging and educational experience of pitching one's own business idea to real venture capitalists.

Participants are able to share their ideas with experienced venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and investors who then critique the plans and share advice. Students then have time to revise their plans accordingly before they return for a final day of judgment. On that day, students try to convince the judges of the merits of their idea within a framework meant to mirror the experience of actually pitching an idea to a potential investor.

Competitors are able to receive "feedback from someone [they] would be lucky to get a phone call from" and "have the emotional experience of facing a venture capital firm," Clark said. While not every student will win prize money, all of which is provided by Howard Cox '64, they hope to take away valuable lessons from the experience of the contest and will be better equipped to succeed as entrepreneurs, Clark said.

A member of the winning team from last year, John Lerch '01, confirmed that the business plan contest offers valuable opportunities for learning.

"Meeting with venture capitalists was just an excellent experience," he said. "We tried to rethink the weaknesses of our plan" after it was critiqued by the panel of financial professionals.

Today, Lerch and other members of his team are still working with their winning concept at their company, Princeton Power Systems. Lerch said they have financial backing, exclusive rights to a patented technology, and, they hope, a competitive product for a growing market.

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He explained that his company plans to help facilities sensitive to power quality events, like sags in voltage or outages, mitigate such aberrations in their power supply. Such events can be very costly to firms, causing service outages and damage to equipment and goods.

This is exactly the type of success story the Entrepreneurship Club's founder, University Engineering Professor Ed Zschau, had imagined.

"My course [ELE 495: High-Tech Entrepreneurship] and the club were both initiatives to provide advice and encouragement for students who have a dream about a company," Zschau said. "Princeton has a lot of very talented people who could start new enterprises."

Entry forms for the contest are due Oct. 26.