Week 3: Summer Venture Program 2017
Prospecting Workshop
Week three of Summer Venture Program was about connecting the entrepreneurs with the outside world; from getting them in touch with potential customers, to helping them making connections with potential investors and advisors. On Monday, June 5, after a quick weekly team update, Mitchell Troyanovsky (Quonvo) delivered his investor presentation during Hot Seat. Quonvo is a web based Q&A platform that connects students with their peers to receive instant one on one chat-based assistance on academic questions. John Whalen (Cathexis), Anmol Garg (OSAM), Nicholas Estrella (Wanku), and Wilson Tang (Knetic) helped Mitchell rebuild the presentation by restructuring the flow and adding creative use cases during the Hot Seat Rebuild. After two hours of heated discussion, Mitchell delivered a solid revamped pitch to David Zamarin (DetraPel), and Kyle Lawson (Vidvision) and received positive feedback.
OpenView
Tuesday, June 6 was rainy, but busy day. Around 12:30pm, we had a Prospecting Workshop hosted by OpenView, a venture capital firm. We had the pleasure of having SVP 2015 alum Bryanne Leeming, founder & CEO of Unruly Studios, join us and share her experiences. The Prospecting Workshop covered best practices our entrepreneurs could use to connect with potential customers, advisors, mentors, or investors. Peers shared questions on how to generate a list of targets, how to reach out to warm/cold contacts, tactics on approaching to investors, etc. Our entrepreneurs actively participated in the discussion and provided individual experiences, tips, and lessons learned when prospecting customers, partners, and investors.
Hot Seat
On Wednesday, John Whalen and Simon Kohnstamm (Cathexis) presented their B2B pitch during Hot Seat. Cathexis is a startup that creates an IoT device that lives in fridge, tracks the health of fruits and vegetables, and warns people before food spoils. With help from Wilson Tang (Knetic), Hannah Wei (CliqBit), Olivia Joslin (CliqBit), and Jacob Riedel (CrossRoads Optics), John and Simon rebuilt their presentation, and then delivered a more passionate and energetic presentation during the Hot Seat Repitch.
Beth Goldstein
Everyone was excited to have Beth Goldstein, one of our advisors, join us for our second Lunch & Learn. Through mostly interactive exercises, Beth showed our entrepreneurs how to make a perfect sales pitch and nailing down a good first impression. Every pitch is a great sales and brand building opportunity. Get it right on what and how you are delivering your business
B2B Sales Lunch and Learn
ideas to your audiences, using the right language, steady posture, appropriate body language, suitable facial expressions, etc. These elements are all important components that decide whether your prospect can become your real customer or not. Through pairing up with one another and doing role play as a sales person and the potential customer, our entrepreneurs practiced their ability to give a 2-mininute and 1-minute presentation to random people and get helpful feedback from peers.
Capital W
Three of our SVP members, Chloris Yang (OSAM), Olivia Joslin and Hannah Wei (CliqBit) volunteered at Capital W, an annual event focused on closing the female funding gap. David Chang, SVP director, moderated the first pitch session featuring four strong women founders.
It has been a great and busy week! Want to know more about SVP’s progress and activities? Visit Summer Venture Program website and follow us on Twitter and Instagram with #babsonsvp! Also save the date for Venture Showcase on Thursday July 27th. More details to come!