Young Inventors Head to Geek Camp
Fresh-Faced Inventors Flock To Boot Camp To Learn How To Talk To Capitalists
The young social innovators made remarkable progress during the boot camp, says faculty member Cheryl Heller, CEO of Heller Communication Design in New York. She advised the group on how to create an effective brand. With today's economy uncertain, creating an effective pitch becomes even more important. "An entrepreneur's ability to quickly explain what it is they're doing and why it's important is priceless," she says.
A number of elements go into an effective pitch, says Robert Fabricant, another member of the boot camp faculty and creative director at Frog Design, a global innovation firm in New York.
"They have to have a story about the rigor with which they've thought through their model so that people who give them money know that they're going to get an impact," he says. "And they have to have a personal story about why they're so passionate about it because people have to walk away believing in something and being willing to help that individual."
Among the young PopTech social innovators polishing their pitches were Chip Ransler and Manoj Sinha, cofounders of Husk Power Systems in Charlottesville, Va. The business partners, who met while attending graduate school at the University of Virginia, have built five mini-electric power plants in remote villages in India. The plants use discarded husks from locally grown rice as fuel. The two hope to have 20 miniplants online by next summer.
Access to electricity at a reasonable cost could vastly improve the lives of millions of rural Indians, Mr. Ransler says.
He and Mr. Sinha were already used to presenting their business model to possible investors, getting 15 or 20 minutes to do it. The boot camp helped them get their message across more quickly. "To establish what the problem is, establish what your solution is and where you're going with it … all that in five minutes, that was challenging," Ransler says.
As a result, their pitch at PopTech stripped away all of the financial details to get to the core – why it mattered. They told the audience, "Somebody needs to do this," Ransler says. "If we get this right, this could be the biggest opportunity out there right now."
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