Team College Mogul (from left): Alex Lindahl ’08, Miles Lennon, and Henry Khachatryan ’08. Photograph: Frank Curran

The young man at the front of the room, in dark slacks and a blue oxford shirt, cast a shadow on the projection screen behind him. “Who,” he asked, “will be the next Microsoft, Google, Dell, or Facebook?” The speaker was Miles Lennon, a Columbia University senior, and he was standing with his business partners from Boston College, Alex Lindahl ’08, a childhood friend, and Henry Khachatryan ’08. With a PowerPoint presentation, they were pitching their Internet startup, College Mogul, a blog that profiles and tracks the business ventures of Generation Y entrepreneurs, loosely defined as individuals in or recently graduated from college.

Lennon’s question was meant to be rhetorical, but it was of particular interest to the audience assembled on April 15 in a meeting room on the fifth floor of Fulton Hall—about a dozen neatly dressed students and six note-taking alumni and faculty seated at long tables strewn with pens, water bottles, and stacks of papers. The occasion was the final round of the second annual Boston College Venture Competition, a contest in which student entrepreneurs vie for $10,000 in seed money to start (or grow) a fledgling business. Five teams, whittled down from 20, were attempting to prove that they had what it takes to join Google (which was started at Stanford), Facebook (started at Harvard), and others, as the next successful company launched by college students.

The Venture Competition is organized by undergraduates at the Carroll School of Management, who, with help from faculty and staff, recruit judges and secure donations of prize money. The contest is intended to closely mirror the nerve-fraying process that entrepreneurs go through in seeking venture financing. Teams must develop detailed written business plans, including financial projections and market analyses, and deliver a 15-minute PowerPoint pitch before the judges. This year, the judges were Larry Begley ’77, managing director of .406 Ventures, a firm that invests in information technology startups; Bill Geary ’80, a general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners and chair of the Boston College Board of Trustees; Jim Kasinger ’97, a partner at the law firm of Goodwin Procter who specializes in mergers and acquisitions and in venture capital and private equity transactions; Mike Naughton, chair of the physics department and himself the recipient of venture money for his energy technology company, Solasta Inc.; Carmel Shields ’81, executive vice president of Shields Health Care Group; and Greg Strakosch, cofounder and CEO of TechTarget, an information technology media company.

Because the competition is open to all BC students, from accounting majors to theology majors, and because the required financial statements are esoteric and technical, the organizers paired each team of competitors with an alumni mentor experienced either in starting a business or in financing new ones. The mentors met with their protégés at least twice leading up to the competition, but they were not permitted to write any part of their business plan.

When it was his team’s turn to present, Gerren Scoon ’08 fiddled with the laptop connection to the projector while his partner, Kimberley Brunelle ’08, shook hands with the judges and placed an information packet on the table before each. Group Runner, their startup, is a suite of Internet-based tools—chat room, calendar, marketing templates, a store for e-shopping—designed to help student organizations communicate and publicize events. As they finished their presentation, Brunelle and Scoon met a battery of questions from the judges. Who developed the website? How big could Group Runner be on a college campus? How widely used are competing products? Strakosch wondered if the idea would work better as a Facebook application, and Scoon replied without hesitation. “Groups do use Face-book as a means of communication, but it’s not one of Facebook’s established goals. . . . We feel that our ability to separate from Facebook and specialize in [communication] tools really gives us an advantage.”

To Ken Carnesi ’08, another competitor, the feedback from the judges was as valuable as the experience of putting together a business plan. Carnesi’s startup was Anaptyx, a wireless Internet service for apartment buildings that he developed with his partner, John Rust ’05. (Carnesi met Rust at his summer job with the brokerage firm A.G. Edwards. The competition’s rules state that at least half of every team must be a current BC undergraduate.) Said Carnesi, “If we were to get one of those people to listen to our pitch individually, it would be a yearlong process—if we were able to at all. It’s worth more than the money, for sure.” Some competitors took away unexpected benefits from the contest. Carnesi and Rust were able to secure Kasinger’s firm as their company’s legal counsel; Elizabeth Wemhoff ’09, whose startup, My College Body, was a health and fitness magazine geared toward college-age women, gained a summer job with her alumni mentor, Jere Doyle ’87, founder, president, and CEO of Prospectiv, an online marketing firm.

All of the judges touched on the importance of presentation. Geary noted how enthusiasm in a presenter can rub off on potential investors. “That excitement becomes part of the interaction and is really inseparable from the core idea—which has to be compelling as well,” he said. “But quite frankly, the idea can be less clear, and if it’s presented well, people will want to take the next step and learn more.”

Naughton told students that every successful pitch has a “wow” moment. For College Mogul, that moment came when the team revealed the number of visits its website had logged (4,678) since launching three weeks earlier. For Anaptyx, it was the presenters’ demonstration of successful pilot programs in Boston, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C. Geary and Naughton singled out Group Runner for its website’s sophisticated user interface, developed from the ground up by Scoon.

Brunelle and scoon’s presentation was the last of the afternoon, and after a period of deliberation (and a move downstairs for dinner), the winners were announced. In addition to $10,000 for the best startup, at stake were $3,000 and $2,000 for second and third place (prizes were donated by Brett and Sherrill Burger Kellam, members of the Class of 1981).

College Mogul was the big winner, with Group Runner taking second prize, and Anaptyx placing third. In explaining their decision, the judges noted that the College Mogul team benefited from coming into the competition with an active website (their blog averaged a post a day) and proof that their content was in demand. As Strakosch put it, “The ultimate test isn’t getting funding. The ultimate test is, will customers buy what you’re selling?” Shields noted the role of perseverance. Lindahl and Lennon of College Mogul had been involved in Q-Note, a startup that won second prize in last year’s competition. “That didn’t help in the point scores, but perseverance does play a part in the success of any venture,” she said. Heeding her words, the winners said they plan to funnel their award back into their product. Geary’s advice to all the teams was to “keep at it,” and he directed it especially to the freshman partnership of Jamila Jones, Lizzie Korsgaard, Stephanie Shen, and Ji-Won Son, who entered the contest with In Connection, a system for helping businesses promote products to college students.

Developing a thick skin is another lesson the Venture Competition is designed to instill. “You’re going to get a lot of nos on the way to getting yeses,” said Strakosch. “Any time you’re starting a business . . . it’s not going to go the way you planned.” According to Carroll School Dean Andrew Boynton, failure is part of entrepreneurial culture. “One of our challenges with our students is that they come in very focused on what they want to do, the path they want to pursue, and it’s very well mapped out in their minds, to a detriment,” he said in an interview. In entrepreneurism, “you can fail, and failure is a badge of honor. . . . It’s a journey of uncertainty,” Boynton said, “and that’s a positive thing.”

Read more by Tim Czerwienski