Event allows UT students to pitch their startup ideas

 

It took psychology graduate student David Lewis nine cups of coffee and 11 energy drinks to make it through the first 48 hours of the fourth biannual “3 Day Startup.”

 The event takes place once every semester and allows students the opportunity to bring their ideas for potential businesses to life. Students are broken up into small teams and then have three days to conceive an idea and develop a business model. Nearly 150 undergraduate and graduate students apply every semester, but only 40 are accepted.

The smaller the group, the more synergy they are going to have, event spokesman Ruben Cantu said. He said the small groups allow participants to collaborate more efficiently during a small period of time, which will bring them toward the ultimate goal of completing a business model.

“3 Day Startup” attracts students from all academic backgrounds, including engineering, business, law, communications and design. Four business ideas were chosen after students pitched their plans to all of the participants on Friday.

Lewis, who developed a plan for a Web-based “diet coach,” used his biology undergraduate degree and psychology graduate experiences to create an algorithm for a fat-burning diet.

“It’s basically Pandora for your mouth,” Lewis said. “You tell it the foods you like, so you go online and create a user profile that has a mobile application. Just as you create a station in Pandora, you create a meal in this situation. When you create a meal, the site will show you foods that have similar properties. You can give a tongue-up or tongue-down to the different foods that you like or don’t like.”

Business graduate student Cam Houser, an organizer and former participant in the program, advised all the teams to focus on launching products that have viable markets.



“If you’re solving a problem that no one else cares about or there’s no money attached to, it’s not as meaningful from a business perspective as solving a problem that someone would pay for,” Houser said.

As an organizer, he wandered around asking the four groups difficult questions so they could tighten up the weaker aspects of their businesses and prepare for the panel pitches.

The panel pitches, in which the groups presented their business ideas to local investors, entrepreneurs and lawyers, took place during the end of the program Sunday night. The panelists and investors were mainly interested in two of the four business products. One, named Shark, was a head set for swimmers that allowed them to count laps, listen to music and see the data regarding their workouts. The other, Clinch, was Lewis’s business idea.

Lewis said he will be setting up a provisional patent, or a legal document protecting his intellectual property, today.

Cantu said it is still too soon to say how much funding each company will receive.