Not really.

Some ideas do matter. If you have made a true scientific breakthrough, the idea, and the intellectual property behind it, is everything. If you discover how to create a steel-plastic alloy with the best properties of both, spend some time with patent lawyers.



But if this isn’t you, read on…

Surprisingly, what really happens in most startups is that founders start out with one idea, nearly go out of business, then morph it, nearly go out of business again, and eventually morph it to something that works. This is true in software, services businesses, and frequently even in hard tech and life sciences. 



A few examples of this are in order: 



- I invested about 10 years ago in a great startup spun out of a national lab that had invented a new biometric identification sensor. The sensor used the chemical properties of the skin, rather than a fingerprint, to pick out the real McCoy. It was good technology, and skirted some of the shortcomings of fingerprints, but it was tricky to build cheaply enough to be economic. Millions of dollars of venture capital and many patents later, the company had yet to release a commercially viable device. But a bright engineer noticed that one of the techniques they were using to evaluate the chemical properties of skin had a side-effect: they could see an unusually clear image of the fingerprint beneath the skin. They realized that they had stumbled upon a better way to image the regular, old fingerprint—better than any approach yet invented. The company is called Lumidigm. The new generation of sensors this company came up with are now what is used in the two highest volume biometric applications in the world–a major theme park in Florida, and the Hong Kong-China border crossing.



- Similarly, when scientists in a hospital ward in Swansea, England were experimenting with sildenafil citrate to treat a form of chest pain, they found that it didn’t help much. But an alert (and possibly red-faced) nurse reported a lot of the patients were ‘tenting’. This compound became a multi-billion dollar success under its more recognizable commercial name: Viagra.



- The fastest-growing tech startup in Massachusetts (that I know of) today is a company called Hubspot, run by a couple of Sloanies, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. They “original” idea that they pursued (while still at MIT) was to build a web-based application to “run” a business. This included (amongst other things) a lightweight database application. What they figured out along the way was that people were much more interested in figuring out how to market their product and grow their business, than run their business. For many, they could run their business on a spreadsheet just fine, but they weren’t able to get leads and customers. This got them side-tracked on a project to understand how well a business was doing online with their marketing efforts. To evaluate that, they built a tool called Website Grader. People said it was cool, so they made it available for free. The tool took off and became in Internet hit. Thousands of companies contacted them asking for help improving their online marketing. The company realized that the essential core of what they were doing was to help companies figure out how to explain themselves in a way that would allow potential customers to find them online. They coined the term “Inbound Marketing” to refer to this discipline, built a rapidly growing business, and have since published a bestselling book by the same name, on that topic.

- My own business, originally called Cambridge Incubator, was started as a kind of factory to quickly produce companies based on some ideas that myself and some friends had come up with. That turned out to be a bad idea, probably because we weren’t smart enough to do this well. But we were stuck with a big, beautiful facility we had built with our venture capital dollars, and a long-term lease obligation to our landlord, MIT. Without much choice, we started renting our pretty space out to other people’s startups that we had no equity stake in. And we were surprised to discover that that business–providing nice space to startups, and the benefits of community that came with it–was a very fast-growing business. We now operate what may be the largest facility in the world doing this.


If you are convinced of my thesis, that the original idea doesn’t matter a whole lot, then it follows that what must matter more is good, flexible execution.

My advice: start with just about any ’starter idea’ (a good, attractive idea that will get you and collaborators going), and then morph it like crazy until you find a sweet spot with high growth and compelling economics. This appears to be how many incredible businesses have been built.

Tim Rowe is the Founder and CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center, a sponsor of the MIT $100K. CIC houses approximately 240 startups, and is perhaps the densest collection of startups anywhere in the world. The Boston Globe has described CIC as “what may just be the most important building in Greater Boston”. In January of 2010 CIC announced a 10-year renewal of its lease with MIT, including an addition of 57,000 new square feet of custom-designed space for entrepreneurs.
Tim is also a Founder and Venture Partner with New Atlantic Ventures, an $115M early stage technology fund based in Kendall Square.
Tim has also served as a judge for the MIT $100K.

$5000 Grand Prize

Rouzbeh Shahsavari
Nano-engineered Concrete
MIT Graduate Student
Energy Track

$2000 Runner-Ups

Dean Berlin
Callinix
MIT Sloan
Life Sciences Track

Laura Paulsen
The Apex by Hydrangle Systems
Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Student
Product & Services Track

$1000 Audience Choice Award

Laura Paulsen
The Apex by Hydrangle Systems
Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Student
Product & Services Track

Top 10 Pitches By Track:
** Semifinalist

DEVELOPMENT

** Mike Norman
Networthy
MIT Sloan MBA Student

** Cody Simmons
UFund
Brown Undergraduate Student

Jimena Almendares
FI Escorpion
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Alex Angerer
Ivy Plus Sperm Ban
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Elizabeth Basha
TerraMetric Development
MIT Graduate Student

David King
WorthMoreThan1000Words
MIT Alumnus

Cliff Lee
SharedSchool

Nelson Meehan
Oral CourseWare
MIT Alumnus

Alastair Ong
GreenSoul Shoes

Ram Rijal
Empowering the Poor
MIT Undergraduate Student

ENERGY

** Charles Able
High Speed Dual-Sring Drilling
MIT Alumnus

** Rouzbeh Shahsavari
Nano-engineered Concrete
MIT Graduate Student

Brian Ahern
Ion-Assisted Combustion
MIT Alumnus

Ben Glass
Altaeros Energies
MIT Graduate Student

Perry Grossman
LED Lights

Rob Lemos
Energy Efficiency
MIT Sloan MBA Student

David Perry
Liver Ember System
RPI Undergraduate Student

Lennon Rodgers
Rapidly Charging Electric Vehicles
MIT Graduate Student

Pedro Santos
Natural Gas Compressor
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Shobin Uralil
Element 14
MIT Sloan MBA Student

LIFE SCIENCES

** Dean Berlin
Callinix
MIT Sloan MBA Student

** Gaurav Das Gaiha
APS Technologies
MIT Graduate Student

Ashly Aust
PeeWizz
RPI Graduate Student

Mac Cowell
LabCloud
Harvard Graduate Student

Noah Davidson
Probiotic Antibiotic Solution
MIT Graduate Student

Sasha Gimpelson
Instant Cancer Treatment & Diagnostics
Harvard Business School

Han Lee
Stem Cell Expansion
Yale Alumnus

Gauti Reynisson
MEDi
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Tom Rose
Short-Shelf-Life Drugs
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Asvin Srinivasan
Safety Spine
MIT Sloan MBA Student

MOBILE

** Ethan Frank Dameron
Consumer Executed In-Store Promotion Auditing

** Jeremy Rossmann
The Bigger Picture
MIT Undergraduate Student

Reid Capalino
Deep Television
MIT Alumnus

Collin D. Wallace
FanGo
Harvard Business School

Maria Fraile
NoMad
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Andre Hamman
MobileBusiness
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Aldi Haryopratomo
PhoneDoctor
Harvard Business School

Miro Kazakoff
My-nalysis
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Harold Mateo
Mobly
Babson Graduate Student

Pulkit Sharma
Electronic Built Environment
MIT Graduate Student

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

** Laura Paulsen
The Apex by Hydrangle Systems
Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Student

** Max Winograd
NuLabel Technologies
Brown Alumnus

Victor Costan
Shower Temperature Control 2.0
MIT Undergraduate Student

Eric Arno Hiller
Innovattio Products

Christina Hruska
VO2 Microbolometer Platform
Harvard Business School

Julia Hu
PSST
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Jakob Parslov
OroClean
RPI Graduate Student

Mohammad Raafat
Portable Fruit Testing System
MIT Graduate Student

Robert Schafer
NeuroMatch
MIT Postdoctoral Fellow

Jason Strauss
Bend-n-Bake
MIT Undergraduate System

WEB/IT

** Elizabeth Geisinger
MyHometownLink
Bucknell Alumnus

** Anmol Madan
BabbleSort
MIT Graduate Student

Jeff Chen
Kakeya
MIT Undergraduate Student

Jeff Engler
Peer to Peer Commercial Lending
Harvard Business School

David Friedman
JobPlanr.com

Eric Arno Hiller
End Around

Jahon Jamli
CatchMyCar.com
Babson Graduate Student

Ian McGraw
Voice-U-Script
MIT Graduate Student

Salil Sethi
Intelligent Mail (IMAIL)
MIT Sloan MBA Student

Julian Yuen
Sell It Now
MIT Undergraduate Student

As I’ve transitioned out of school and back into the real world over the past year, it’s occurred to me that the MIT $100K board should maybe add a last piece to the above sentence: “ […] to help build companies in particular by teaching entrepreneurs how to build teams, and why they should always be selling!” More on the selling piece in a future post, safe to say that you always need to be selling – prospects, vendors, investors, employees, etc. If you’re an MIT student you should not leave Cambridge without taking Howard Anderson and Bill Aulet’s class, 15.387 Technology Sales and Sales Management.

You can’t win the MIT $100K without a great team.

In my experience, teams are what make or break you. It was true in the two seasons of the MIT $100K that I personally experienced. Finalists and winning teams were always cohesive, complimentary, performing teams of engineers and business students, leaders and role players, everyone with a specific position – and the team greater than the sum of its parts.

It was equally true on the MIT $100K organizing teams that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. I was honored to work with some of the brightest, most passionate and most driven entrepreneurial minds at MIT and beyond. We organized a year-long, three contest competition, with literally thousands of student participants, dozens of industry sponsors and 15+ events throughout the year. And we did it all as full-time graduate student volunteers! We worked well together, celebrated each other’s victories and picked each other up when the going got tougher.

In basketball or entrepreneurship, five all-stars do not a team make.

Before you go out and recruit a team of all-star, prima donnas who want the glory but don’t want to do the dirty work, remember the USA Olympic basketball team of 2004? They ended up with the bronze medal and were beaten by supposedly lesser teams like Puerto Rico. Let me repeat that: USA Basketball got a Bronze Medal at the Olympics! Why? Simple: they didn’t play like a team, they played like individual all-stars out for the stats, not the W.

It is a lot more than just putting some all-stars together. It’s about cohesion, culture, leadership and roles. I’m learning this myself all over again at SaaSure, my new enterprise Software-as-a-Service company (http://www.saasure.com). In our case, we quickly learned that all-star coders might write better software in isolation, but if no one wants to work with them they won’t do you much good. Just like in basketball, enterprise software is built as the sum of parts, and if those parts don’t integrate well together, you’ll be going nowhere fast.

Teamwork starts at the top – you must lead by example.

VCs say that they invest first in markets, second in teams and third in products.
As an enterprise software guy, the future in my industry is clearly is cloud computing, so when I was looking to start my next company my direction was an easy choice. But as any VC will also tell you, it’s very hard to be a solo entrepreneur. So when my co-founder Todd McKinnon and I started talking about working together, we quickly dug into “how we’re going to functionally work together.” Hard conversations to be sure, but a necessary task if you want to build a world-class company!

Now that we’re off and running, with our first paying customers going live, not a day goes by here at SaaSure where we don’t think about how lucky we are to have such a great team: Todd runs product and engineering, with a fantastic core group of engineers, and I am focused on customers and operations. Our first hires were key and we spent a lot of our time interviewing candidates and eventually honed in on the right teammates. After a strenuous, lengthy and detailed process of interviews and coding tests, we started all engineers off on a 2-month contractor agreement to make sure that it’s the right fit in terms of culture, vision, work ethic, etc. We want to make sure that “we really like each other before getting married” to put it simply.

Everyone’s process is different and optimized for different situations. At Salesforce.com we often talked about the “double beer test”. After all the credentials had been checked and interviews passed, the hiring team would get together and ask whether a. you’d invite the candidate out for a beer, and b. if they accepted, would you be happy to have them along. At the end of the day, as an entrepreneur at a startup you’re going to spend a lot of time with your colleagues – more than with your wife and children most likely, for weeks or months on end – so make sure you all like each other. As an old sales manager of mine used to say, “we win together, so don’t fail alone!”

Frederic Kerrest is passionate about enterprise technology and has spent the last 12 years helping companies improve their operations by embracing software solutions. In early 2009, Frederic co-founded SaaSure with the vision of empowering businesses to transform their web applications into an intelligent, integrated Cloud Area Network™.

From 2007 to 2009, Frederic attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management where he was the 2008 MIT Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. Entrepreneurship Award recipient and Managing Director of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Frederic earned a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA in Entrepreneurship & Innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The theme of the night was The Matrix and the MIT $100K’s search for “The One.” The competition organizers continued their efforts of combining entertainment with entrepreneurship, and created an evening full of excitement and comedy. The event started with a poster session where all semi-finalist teams displayed their ideas for the general public. Highlights of the evening included topics such as why a recession is a great time to be an entrepreneur, a preview of the upcoming MIT $100K Business Plan Contest, and an inspiring keynote address from Dr. Christina Lampe-Onnerud, CEO and Founder of Boston Power.

The night continued with $2,000 track prizes awarded to each of the six track winners, 60-second elevator pitches from each team, and the awarding of the Audience Choice and Judges’ Choice winners. The track winners were:

Track Winners

• Development: Vala – VALA is a company that uses mobile phone technology to instantly connect consumers to what they need and desire from vendors in the informal market of urban India.  VALA promises to increase the market activity of low-income vendors, while opening a sizeable profit potential through tiered fees, advertisement, and high-value data.
• Energy: OzComp Natural Gas Compressors - OzComp is a high efficiency double-acting compressor technology developed in conjunction with MIT with high serviceability and low weight/footprint for natural gas applications at the wellhead. Modular design and lower manufacturing cost are other benefits as well.
• Life Sciences: Hydrangle Systems - Hydrangle Systems has discovered a way for men diagnosed with prostate cancer to maintain potency while undergoing prostate cancer treatment surgeries. The Apex by Hydrangle Systems is a probe-like device that is used during prostate cancer “freezing” treatments to protect the “sex nerves” surrounding the prostate and preserve potency.
• Mobile: Pushpins – A viral and interactive couponing platform that pushes coupons as consumers browse and scan products in grocery and retail settings.
• Products and Services: Leotus Home Cooling - Leotus is redefining home cooling with a modular room air conditioner. Leotus’ patent pending technology splits the traditional unit into three parts- an indoor unit, an outdoor unit, and a connector bridge- resulting in a system that is safe and easy to install, tastefully designed, and allows full use of your window.
• Web/IT: peerTransfer – An innovative online international money transfer & payments startup out of MIT.  Thanks to its patent pending technology, it provides individuals and small businesses with a low cost alternative compared to international bank transfers, saving around $300 for every $10.000 sent while increasing convenience and reliability.

In addition, a $1,000 Audience Choice Award was chosen using technology from $100K alumni company, PollEverywhere, and awarded to Hydrangle Systems.

The night concluded with the awarding of the $3,000 Judges Choice Award to Pushpins.

Events are already underway for the MIT $100K Business Plan Contest, with a submission deadline on March 4. Semi-finalists will be announced at an event on March 11th and the finale event, where the MIT $100K will award over $350,000 in cash and prizes, will be on May 12th.

But can entrepreneurship really be taught? Since the competition started in 1990, lots of course offerings and degree programs, at MIT and other schools, have emerged claiming to provide the knowledge and hone the requisite skills. The assumption is that one can emerge from these programs fully qualified to be entrepreneur.

Programs that claim to groom entrepreneurs waver in popularity. Many of these programs started at the height of the dot com frenzy, only to see enrollment drop and interest wane after the internet crash as people returned to more conventional career paths. More recently, educational programs offering life science-specific entrepreneurship emphasis flourished, but they’re off their peak as well. Now, green tech and energy seem to be all the rage.

So for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll contend that there are three core qualities to a successful entrepreneur: 1) lowered sense of risk aversion, 2) an ability to ignore the true personal opportunity cost, and 3) passion.

1) Risk assessment / Risk management: Entrepreneurs discount risk less steeply than others; there’s a “willing suspension of disbelief” as an entrepreneur’s subjective risk assessment tends to discount the reality of what’s probably ahead against the vision of what could be assuming all goes according to plan. Risk analysis can be taught, but in almost all startups an objective risk analysis would conclude that the venture is too risky to pursue. Why do entrepreneurs forge ahead anyway in the face of objective data to the contrary?

2) Ignoring the opportunity cost: In the less economically developed areas of the world people become entrepreneurs because they simply have no other choice: there’s no well-developed job market for them to join. But for most people with the academic credentials and other resources to enroll in an entrepreneurship program, taking traditional paid employment provides an expectation of higher income overall than setting out on your own in a startup. Do entrepreneurs weigh the security of a long-term position with an established firm differently? Are they more willing to accept uncertainty overall? (It’s true that many companies now claim to be looking for employees with entrepreneurial qualities, so these programs may be training people to be “entrepreneurial” rather than being “entrepreneurs” — maybe that’s a topic for a follow-up post?)

3) Passion: This is perhaps the key defining property of an entrepreneur: the determining factor that sets them apart from the crowd. To try and fully define passion here would be an effort in frustration, but we all know it when we see it: it’s the determination to persevere in the face of all sorts of adversity, to refuse to give up, to refuse to take “no” for an answer.

Can these qualities be taught? Sure, anything can be taught, esp. given the caliber of students typically entering these programs.
But is it being taught? My gut feel is that entrepreneurial programs serve a valuable role providing people who already had the “right stuff” an opportunity to self-select, a way to congregate, and make connections. They also teach important business nuts and bolts. But truly creating an entrepreneur might involve incorporating additional academic disciplines it currently doesn’t, or even a kind of training that’s totally different to anything that higher education’s used to offering now.

Do you agree? What can the MIT $100K Competition, MIT, the larger educational process, and society overall — do better to improve outcomes?

Peter Mui is founder of the MIT Entrepreneurs Club and co-founder of the MIT $10K Entrepreneurial Competition. He’s been involved in numerous startups, taught entrepreneurship at UCSF, and has judged business plans and mentored teams at MIT, UCSF, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of San Francisco and Babson College.

Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Online, 6/2009

Now in its 20th year, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition has set the standard for cultivating student entrepreneurship and building successful startup companies. To date, the $100K has launched 120+ companies, including major success stories Akamai and Harmonix, with market cap in excess of $12.5 Billion. The competition distinguishes itself by offering more prize money, networking opportunities, and mentorship to participants than any other student contest. And with 260 submissions across six industry tracks—Development, Energy, Life Sciences, Mobile, Products & Services, and Web/IT—the $100K has demonstrated that entrepreneurship is alive and well despite it being a recession year.

Recognizing the contributions of the MIT $100K Competition, Governor Deval Patrick of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts proclaimed May 13th—the date of the $100K Grand Finale—as “Entrepreneurship at MIT” Day.

Grand Prize Winner and Audience Choice Award

This year’s Grand Prize Winner and recipient of $100,000 was Ksplice, which has developed non-disruptive operating system updates so that you can achieve better security and reliability with lower maintenance costs. Says Ksplice COO Waseem Daher, “You know those annoying,’You must reboot to install new updates’ pop-ups? We make those obsolete.”

The Audience Choice Award Winner was Global Cycle Solutions (GCS). GCS develops and sells affordable, cost-effective solutions in the form of bicycle peripherals, which allow rural villagers in developing countries to earn extra income and significantly boost productivity…

—

More Press:

• Possible in Italy? Our Judging Lead Francesco Renzo writes a guest column about the $100K on “Italians,” blog of renowned Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini who is serving as a writer-in-residence at MIT.  English Translation here.  11/18/09
• Governor Patrick Announces $1 Million Business Plan Competition to Draw Startups to Massachusetts, by Wade Roush, Xconomy, 6/10/09
• Breaking Down the MIT $100K Field, by Brendan Lynch, Mass High Tech, 5/29/09
• Behind the Scenes of the MIT $100K Competition: Leveraging 20 Years of History in 6 Months, by $100K Co-Managing Directors Brian Cantwell and Sombit Mishra, Xconomy, 5/19/09
• Back to Work and Flipping Cheeseburgers—A $100K Winner’s Tale, by Waseem Daher of Ksplice, Xconomy, 5/18/09
• Husk Insulation Wins $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Prize: Building Better Refrigerators from Rice Husks, by Wade Roush, Xconomy, 5/13/09
• Ksplice wins $100,000 Prize in MIT Start-up Contest, by Lance Whitney, CNet, 5/14/09
• From the $100K Managing Directors, by Brian Cantwell and Sombit Mishra, MIT Sloan Fifteen, 4/14/09

It started out as all big things start – small.

Act 1; Scene 1. It is 1987. Setting; First Meeting of the MIT Entrepreneurs Club founded by Peter Mui (Class of ‘83, Course 6). Action: MIT engineer and science students hacking around ideas that they have about new products and cool things. (Note: the E-Club still meets every Tuesday evening and is still led by Richard Shyduroff, who’s attended since its inception). The discussion is technical but eventually turns to how to launch these ideas.

Act 1; Scene 2. Same time. Setting: MIT Sloan New Ventures Club. Action: Sloan management students talking about new business formation and financing. Where do ideas come from?

Act 1; Scene 3. Same year. I am not sure exactly how this happened but the Entrepreneurs Club and the New Ventures Club members start hacking together about new things and new companies.

Act 1; Scene 4. Same year. How about a competition to find the best new business idea at MIT? Note: Initially this was mostly about the next big technology thing. Meeting called by students at the Technology Licensing Office (TLO) with a few invited people, including me. Did a competition make sense? Would you guys be the judges? What should the prize be? $1K is suggested by the students. John Preston, then head of the TLO, suggests $10K which would be enough for a winner and some runners up to at least get a patent filing on record. Result: The $10K is launched as another student activity. Who knew how big it would become……

Act 1; Scene 5. First Year of the Competition. About a dozen entries. They all read like research grant proposals. You could tell what lab they came from based on the printer font. Winner has a technology to clean the surface of silicon wafers using a laser. Later it turns out that IBM has a patent application pending on a very similar technology.

Next Time: Act 2: The $10K Starts to Grow – Funding Provided by David Morgenthaler, founder of Morgenthaler Ventures.

Joe Hadzima is a Managing Director of Main Street Partners, a venture development and technology commercialization firm. He is also President of Main Street Partners’ portfolio company IPVision, Inc., which provides systems and services for the analysis and management of intellectual property. Joe is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was a founding judge of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and was formerly Chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum. He has been involved with over 130 new ventures over the last 30 years as a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, lawyer and board member.

The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition strives to enable entrepreneurs to successfully launch their business. Over the past 20 years, we have established an amazing community of entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, judges and alumni with great insight into the entrepreneurial experience.

With the MIT $100K blog, we want to give a voice to our community. This will be a place to learn about the competition, keep up-to-date on MIT $100K alumni news, and discuss all things entrepreneurial.

We want to start by reflecting on how far we’ve come. We have invited some of those who are most familiar with the competition by reaching out to the competition’s founders and early participants – back when the MIT $100K was known as the MIT $10K. The competition has grown at an incredible rate in terms of number of participants, quality of business plans, mentoring services and sponsorship support. As part of the organizing team, we feel honored to bear witness to this phenomenon – this year we broke our own record again with 139 submissions for the 2009 Executive Summary Contest – and we anticipate another record year for business plan submissions in 2010.

MIT $100K Submissions by Year

Whether you’re participating in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurial Competition or just want a little entrepreneurial inspiration, we hope you’ll participate in this forum. Please follow us and check back often!

Emily Short and Luke Behnke are part of the MIT $100K organizing committee. Emily came to MIT to learn from entrepreneurs and is inspired by the MIT $100K. Luke came to MIT to pursue Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and to get connected to the incredible entrepreneurial ecosystem (exemplified by the MIT $100K).

*             *             *

Ciao Beppe,

First of all, thanks a lot for the 98^th Pizzata Italians MIT/Harvard, yesterday in Cambridge, MA. Beyond the pleasure of having so many Italians under the same roof, there’s also the selfish relief of having joined (and helped organizing!, with Edo, Marco and Mauro) one of the last pizzata, after hearing about dozens of them on “Italians”.

Yesterday we talked for 30 seconds about the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Here’s some more details.

The MIT$100K is the largest student run entrepreneurship competition in the world. Every year, since exactly 20 years ago, here’s what happens: hundreds of thousands of dollars in budget and prizes, provided by about twenty sponsoring companies, are managed by around fifty student organizers, for about a thousand teams, with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists recruited as judges, mentors, coaches, speakers. MIT doesn’t give us a single dime: we even pay rent on the small office we have at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center (by the way, you should come visit it, at the E-Center invention rhymes with commercialization).

My role at the $100K is judging, which means to write the rules and recruit rockstars from the ecosystem as judges. The roles of my fellows organizers include marketing, events, sponsorship, alumni relations, management of industry tracks.

The Competition lasts one whole year, and comprises three contests: the Elevator Pitch Contest in the fall, the Executive Summary Contest in the winter and the Business Plan Contest in the spring. Each contest is structured over six industry tracks: development, life sciences, mobile, products & services e web/IT. Teams don’t enter just for the hundred thousand dollars grand prize in the name: they enter for the network, the feedback, the visibility online (the whole Cambridge entrepreneurial blogosphere) and on paper (WSJ, among others). The organizers work on it (for free) because, for example, it’s awesome to watch last year winner, at the time a “lab mouse” with a few numbers in a laptop, gather millions worth of grants and funding, in less than a year. Among the Boston VCs, being a judge or a mentor for the $100K is stuff worth a line in their resume.

And it looks like the toy is working well. In the last 20 years, we estimate that the $100K has created more than 85 companies, among which the famous Akamai (web services colossus) and Harmonix (ever heard about Guitar Hero?). The publicly listed alumni companies are worth about 10 billion dollars (post-crisis…); the ones that didn’t go public have been bought out, generating about 2.7 billion dollars, or 147 million dollars a year, on average. Last but not least, we conservatively estimate that the Competition has created about 2,500 jobs in the US, from Cambridge to Palo Alto.

What do you think? Any way to start anything similar in Italy?