TYE 2009 Kicks Off!

Welcome to TYE, or TiE Young Entrepreneurs, the place for all-things-entrepreneurial. We had a tremendous turnout at our kick-off event a couple weeks ago. To start the new season, we've decided to blog about our journey. It has already started with questions like "What is an entrepreneur" and "Who needs revenue anyways?" but pretty soon we'll start to hear questions such as "Why does Apple (or insert company name here) have a good business model?" and "Is it really that good?" Who knows, you may even end up asking us "When can I pick up my check for $10,000 since I won the TYE business plan contest!?"

At our first event, we played a game called "Be a VC" (note: in case you already forgot, VC stands for venture capital). We asked all of the program participants to choose to fund, or finacially back, one of two hot new products. Our entire class was split into two camps. Each camp was asked to answer the question "If you had $5 million dollars, which product would you invest in and why?"

The first team selected the MyVu iPod video-projecting accessory glasses and the second team chose the Digit Wireless "Fasttap finger pad." The final showdown occurred when each team, in front of the entire audience of fifty+ parents, was asked to offer compelling reasons to invest in their chosen product. Both teams were able to provide comprehensive information on subjects such as market size, product innovation, competition, and pricing. The audience, our resident venture capitalists if you will, were shrewd and wanted to know everything we could tell them. The MyVu team won the vote by a narrow margin, but it was close. Next time we'll cover the analysis in a little more depth. Stay tuned...