Congratulations to Cerene Biomedics

Congratulations to Cerene Biomedics, which travelled to SEBIO (www.sebio.com) and won their track to win $100,000.  

Cerene previously won the Duke Start-Up Challenge in the spring of 2008.

From CNN's spring write-up "Cerene Biomedics is working to prevent seizures using a kind of high-tech brain freeze."

-Howie

Standing room only at the Duke Start-up Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition

Finals event - Standing room only at the Duke Start-up Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition, originally uploaded by Entrepreneurship at Duke University.

We had a fantastic turnout for the Elevator Pitch Competition on Wednesday, November 19th. This event was run by the Duke Start-Up Challenge (www.dukestartupchallenge.org) and was tied in with Entrepreneurship Week at Duke University (www.eweekatduke.com)

Congrats to Cerene Biomedics

Congrats to Cerene Biomedics for being selected to present at SEBIO!

Cerene has participated in Barry Myer's Invention to Application course, as well as being the winner of the Duke Start-Up Challenge in the spring of 2008. 

http://news.sebio.org/2008/11/18/sebio-announces-four-finalists-selected-in-2nd-annual-bioplan-competition-finalists-to-present-at-upcoming-investor-forum/

A great Fall 2008

It's been a great (and rather busy) Fall 2008 here at Duke University.

Some highlights:

1) Over 60 competitors at our Elevator Pitch Competiton (part of the Duke Start-Up Challenge) up from around 25 last year.

2) Entrepreneurship Week at Duke University 2008 was a great success.  Pictures can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/eshipatduke, and the website for the event is at www.eweekatduke.com.  We had between 11 great events that engaged undergraduated, the School of Medicine, Fuqua, Law, etc...

3)  Launched the Program for Entrepreneurs, a pilot program that lets eight students receive an MBA while starting a company (with course credit).  We have eight great and motivated students going through this program.

4)  Had our first official Duke Entrepreneurship Education Series, a weekly series where we brought speakers in, and walked students through the process of starting a company. www.dukedees.com 

5)  Held our first "One Day Startup", a set of workshops where students work to start a company in one day.  We had 70 students spend their Saturday with us, and had great feedback on the event.

Duke Start-Up Challenge 2008 Winners

Duke Start-Up Challenge Winners!

Saturday, April 12th was the 9th Annual Duke Start-Up Challenge Finals. Nine

teams presented their business plan proposals to a panel of judges. The

Awards Ceremony was then kicked off with an inspirational speech by Chairman

and former CEO of Red Hat, Matthew Szulik. We are proud to present the

following winners:

*Overall Grand Prize Winner $25,000 & Health Care Track

Cerene Biomedics

Heidi Koschwanez (PhD candidate, BME), Christina Li (PhD student, BME), Carolyn

Nohejl (BME, '08), Vivek Sasikumar (Fuqua, '08), John Stroncek (PhD student,

BME)

*Overall Runner Up $10,000

WaterPLUS

Naman Shah, Saket Vora, Joel Thomas, J.E. (Win) Bassett IV, Kari Leech, Will

Patrick (Trinity, '10)

*People's Choice Trade Show Winner $1,000

Game Everything

Ferol Vernon (Fuqua, '09), Mausam Bhatt (Fuqua, '09)

*High-Tech Track Award $5,000

A-B-Sea Research

Al Basilico, John Galetsky, Jennifer Artabane (Fuqua, '08)

*Consumer Products Track Award $5,000

Visible Energy

Luke Fishback (MEM, '03), Sarah Kate Fishback (Fuqua, '09)

*Social Track Award $5,000

WaterPLUS

Naman Shah, Saket Vora, Joel Thomas, J.E. (Win) Bassett IV, Kari Leech, Will

Patrick (Trinity, '10)

Thanks to the Co-Presidents, Kris Irwin, Hylton Kalvaria, and Steve Allan (all three are Fuqua '09)

New leadership in the EVCC

We have new student leaders in the EVCC. Bobby Brenman and Amy Laverdiere recently took the helm and have recruited an excellent cabinet.

Bobby went to Northwestern University for his undergraduate studies, and worked in sales and trading at Lehman Brothers. After Lehman Brothers, he worked at a boutique consulting firm, before coming to Fuqua. He will be interning at Google this summer. He can be reached at bobby.brenman@fuqua.duke.edu.




Amy went to MIT for her undergraduate studies, and worked at both Genentech and Genzyme before coming to Fuqua. She is a Duke Venture Fellow, and is working for Hatteras Venture Partners through the summer. She can be reached at amy.laverdiere@fuqua.duke.edu.

We are thrilled to have such capable and motivated student leaders for the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club.

Thanks to Jen, Josh, and everyone that helped this year!

Special thanks to Jennifer Artabane and Joshua Payne, the outgoing EVCC co-presidents. They did an outstanding job and should be commended for having a wonderful year leading the club. They led a number of new initiatives, but some of the highlights were the Week-in-Cities program which took place in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., Charlotte, and Atlanta, the Day in RTP, the weekly newsletter, recruiting a solid first year cabinet, and helping to organize the inaugural Entrepreneurship Week. They were awesome! We will miss them and wish them the best of luck.





The EVCC Second Years

Blue Devil Weekend

Blue Devil Weekend was a great success as usual. Thanks to Alli and Kendra for organizing, as well as the entire admissions team.

We actively recruited students interested in entrepreneurship and saw some great interest. Between the two career panels focused on entrepreneursip, I counted approximately 75-80 students, or about 25% of the estimated attendees at BDW (I believe the estimate was somewhere north of 300 attendees).

The career panels featured students that had recently graduated along with our two new co-presidents, Amy and Bobby, to talk about their experiences in the Duke MBA.

In addition, we held both an Office Hours event and an Open House that drew out some really neat students.

VCIC Competition Internal

Through the hard work of Mike Midgett, Class of 2008, we held our VCIC Internal competition. We had over 15 students participate and compete in this "Be a VC for a day" competition.

It was a great event, and the winning team handled themselves well, particularly when in the firing line of our guest judges which included local VC's and angels.

A wonderful learning experience for all.

Not only does Mike deserve credit for putting on this program, but he also deserves credit for leading the VC101 and VC 102 sessions that helped prepare students for the event. Great job, Mike!

See more pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/howrhee/sets/72157604285640321/

CED's MedTech Conference

We were proud to help the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), one of the largest entrepreneurial support organizations in the country, host the new MedTech conference, focused on medical device innovations. The Research Triangle area has a lot of strengths in this area. This conference will hopefully be a focal point for years to come, just as CED's Venture Conference, Tech Conference, and Biotech Conference have been great events for over 20 years here in the Research Triangle.

Notable speakers included Richard Stack, one of the founders of Synecor, which spun out of Duke and has already created and sold about three companies with a total market cap of over 500 million dollars. Also, the former president and CEO of Guidant Corporation, Ronald Dollens, gave a wonderful talk.

This event was held at Fuqua.

Duke's Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Property

We held the Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Property at Duke. It was a great lineup of speakers, and was hosted by our very own Marshall Phelps, Executive-in-Residence, and Corporate VP at Microsoft, and Prof. Wes Cohen.

We had visitors come in from many different parts of the country and the world.

The video for the conference is up, so in case you missed it, you can check it out. Go to http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/event/ipconference/

A big thanks to the Kauffman Foundation for providing a lot of support this great event. In addition, we'd like to thank Microsoft, ThinkFire, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers for their support as well.