Guest Speaker Amy Sallin

On February 5, 2015 we had a guest speaker come to our class named Amy Sallin. She is an Assistant Director and Business Plan Competition (BPC) Program Manager at the University of Washington. She came to inform us about the BPC that gets held every year at UW Seattle and how it works. She gave us a brochure which had very helpful information for the people that do intend on joining the competition. Furthermore, she talked about how to join, who could join, how much funding a team could win, etc. The BPC has been going on for 18 years now. It’s designed to promote student start-up ideas and venture creation by bringing students and judges from the entrepreneurial community in a multi-stage, real world challenge. There is no fee to join the competition. There are requirements to join the competition though, such as there needs to be at least one student from the state of Washington per team, if not more. In addition, people that aren’t students can join the competition but need to have one Washington State student on their team. A team needs to submit a 5-7 page executive summary. There is a screening process with judges who look at 7 criteria’s. Students can use resources that UW Seattle provides such as advisory from attorneys, industry leaders, etc. There is a grand price of $25,000 as well as other funding. I believe Amy Sallin stated that the BPC has awarded about $1.6 million in prize money since it first started. One thing that she said that I really liked was that, an investor will usually invest in an “A team” with a “C idea” rather than a “C team” with an “A idea”.