A few months ago I entered an idea competition at the University of Utah called Tech Titans. If you follow the link you'll notice that #9 says "Inexpensive smoking cessation drug, U." That's my idea. It's actually a pretty cool idea that I'm working on with a professor. While I'm stoked that I got as far as I did, this part of the story has a sad ending. For the first part of the competition I had to submit a 2 page brief on my idea along with a 1 min video clip. The first round of judging put me in the Top-10 out of some 40 submissions, just slipping in at number 10. The second part of the competition included a 10 min presentation in front of 4 judges who were successful entrepreneurs, business professionals and investors. One of the judges scored me 15/100 and said it was the worst presentation he had ever seen in his entire life! Talk about a confidence killer.
Luckily I'm involved with another project called Monitus Medical, a medical device company making products that detect leaks and perforations that may occur during surgery. For their first product I am working with a team of students to develop a commercial plan and we submitted it to another competition called Opportunity Quest. If you follow this link you'll notice that one of the Top-10 finishers is Monitus Medical after a first round of business plan judging, and if the site ever updates you will notice that Monitus Medical took 2nd place after a second round of presentation based judging. We won $3,000. It was a good day. Plus I have proven that I'm not the worst presenter in the world, or perhaps I just got lucky.
