We Won Venture Capital Pitch Contest!

The venture capital pitch competition was held last Thursday night at Pace University’s Business School in NYC. What a fun event! I started the pitch about something that most people like, fast cars and computers. I used Knight Rider as a theme for the pitch. I then briefly outlined the technical capabilities about what it can do now and what it will do with some VC money when the prototype is built-out. Slides with more technical info. were shown behind me as I described how the team did it and what we’d like to do with it in the future. During the Q&A, I addressed how much money we’re looking for ($30K just to build-out the prototype).

The majority of the judges were VCs and one like it. I met with him the following evening along with the President of a car computer company that has related, but not similar, products. They liked the idea and said the market is huge, but didn’t like the reverse engineering and brute forcing the protocols that we’ve done. Although that has been a valid and legal business model in the past (Compaq did it to IBM), the VCs want it done with licenses and defensive patenting. We might be able to do it like that as long as we don’t lose the open source/free software platform. We’re talking.