Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Summer Catalyst Program WEEK6: Jed Christiansen, TechStars + Showcase Prep

With only a handful of weeks left in the program, participants have been perfecting their pitches in preparation for the Summer Catalyst Showcase. Although every participant has been working hard to make progress in their own respective venture, it’s refreshing to see everyone in the program actively sharing resources and supporting each other.

This week’s guest speaker was Jed Christiansen, a product manager from Techstars and the founder of SEED-DB. Jed Christiansen gave a great presentation on the value of accelerators, further motivating participants to pursue similar programs in the future. During the talk, Jed Christiansen pointed out that a business pitch really matters, and if you spend time creating an exemplary pitch, you can use your pitch as a template for your business. 

In preparation for the Venture Showcase, Rachel Pardue ‘19 from LOU and Ross Mathews M’18 from Futurespan presented their refined pitches. There was a great deal of improvement when it came to expressing a compelling narrative during the pitch presentations. Elliott Adams reminded participants that the aspect of storytelling is crucial in a pitch because this not only capture  the attention of the audience, but will also provide the audience with an emotional connection.

In addition, BabsonSF hosted a group from Saudi Arabia for a week long mini-MBA bootcamp taught by Babson professor Phil Kim. During the week, tech entrepreneurs from Belgium and Saudi Arabia learned how to increase engagement with existing networks. By the end of the workshop, post-it notes decorated the walls of the common area and everyone had the chance to get to know each other. It’s amazing to see how the BabsonSF campus consistently brings in people from all over the world-not just the Bay Area- which is representative of Babson’s international presence.

Stay tuned via instagram @babsonsf to see the latest events at our San Francisco campus and save the date for our Summer Catalyst Showcase on August 2, 2018. You can register here!