Future Entrepreneur Challenge — Pitch Event
May 14, 2020
Our second online cohort of motivated and talented middle and high school students has successfully completed the Future Entrepreneur Challenge (FEC)! With a mix of lectures, group work, and meetings with mentors, FEC helped the young students gain the knowledge and skills they need to start their own businesses.
Throughout the class, the students chose a problem to work on, came up with a business idea to address it, and learned and applied the following concepts to their company:
- customer discovery
- value proposition
- minimum viable product (MVP) design
- customer validation
- customer acquisition, and
- business model development.
Just like in real life, some teams started with an idea but then realized it wasn’t what they really wanted to address so they either slightly changed it — for instance, they changed the target audience — or they chose a completely different issue. Their ideas ranged from time management applications to grocery delivery from ethnic stores, music application, or a platform for connecting students with tutors.
On May 12, the students had to pitch their business ideas to judges who are experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors from companies such as AI8 Ventures, Enterprise Development Group, Coinbase, or MSND Capital.
Although nervous about the pitch and the Q&A session, all the groups did a wonderful job explaining how they chose the problem they wanted to tackle and their solution, who they are targeting, how their business model looks like, or how much money they need. In fact, they did such a great job that the judges had a hard time choosing a winner. Herman Gyr, the founder of Enterprise Development Group, mentioned: “I was blown away!”, “No one should leave defeated in any way. They all put in so much effort and did a really great job.”, and “The last one [group], 7th and 8th graders, remarkable!”.
Like every competition though, FEC had to have a winner, too. And May’s winner was … C-Major, a music app that lets users automatically transcribe audio input into sheet music, play it on a synthesized instrument, as well as collaborate with others.
At the end, the judges shared their thoughts on how each team did and they emphasized once again their passion and their ability to clearly state their idea and answer questions asked by their peers and by the judges.
All the students who have completed Phase 1 of the FEC are eligible to register for Phase 2, which will take place from June 28 to August 22, 2020. FEC Phase 2 is an accelerator program that provides a framework and the support young entrepreneurs need to succeed in their business ventures. The goals for this program are to validate their startup idea with target customers, build a minimum viable product (MVP) and make a professional business plan in order to raise funding, and attract new hires.
If this sounds interesting to you, we’ll kick off one more FEC Phase 1 cohort on May 26. We just have a few spots available so don’t miss the chance to register: https://harmonyplus.com/future-entrepreneur-challenge/
