On Saturday morning, 125 Northwestern students pitched 70 ideas; 48 hours later, three teams were named winners of StartupNU.
But even though it was competitive, StartupNU wasn’t some high-stakes pitch contest (although Motorola did stop by). Instead of focusing on awarding big prizes, StartupNU existed solely so that students could form relationships with each other and get familiar with faculty - all because NUvention, Northwestern’s six-month entrepreneurship course, is just around the corner.
NUvention, which kicks off in January, highly stresses that students from different schools (say, Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Kellogg School of Management) work together. The interdisciplinary aspect is so vital to NUvention that Mike Marasco, the director of Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, said StartupNU wasn’t as much about the ideas, as it was about finding good people.
“We weren’t as interested in great ideas; we were more interested in interdisciplinary teams and relationships forming between schools,” Marasco said.
This weekend’s StartupNU event was used much like Startup Incinerator was used last year - so that students could prove their worth for a spot in the NUvention class. Marasco said this week he will be picking about 50 participants from 100 applicants for next quarter’s NUvention courses such as web, impact and energy.
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StartupNU winners, who have proved themselves deserving of an NUvention spot, include Kellogg student Terrance Wallace (who pitched a hardware/software company for the physical therapy field), Kellogg student Carri Cowan (who pitched a P2P lending company) and a team consisting of a McCormick Master’s student and a plant biology PhD student (who focused on recycling for small and medium businesses).
With about fifteen mentors present throughout the weekend, including Marasco and ContextMedia’s Rishi Shah and Shradha Agarwal, the StartupNU participants used real-time voting (thanks to LiveWatch Security CEO Brad Morehead’s ASAPer app) to pick the best teams and ideas. But, the competition isn’t necessarily something Marasco said he will repeat to select NUvention teams again next year because, rather than narrowing people down and out, “it’s more about forming relationships here.”
