Life At The Global Student Entrepreneur Awards Finals!
This week I had the amazing opportunity to present BounceFire at the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards (GSEA) competition, held in Kansas City, MO. It was ridiculous to say the least. I mean, here I am in a great hotel, in a great city, surrounded by some of the smartest business minds I’ve ever seen and most of them aren’t even out of school yet. I mean we had guys and girls barely of drinking age running businesses with over $10 Million a year in revenue and creating hundreds of jobs around the world!
In addition to that feat, Cade Zvavanjanja from Zimbabwe was representing his business Gainful Information Security as a college student in one of the most disadvantaged countries in the world. In addition to Zimbabwe there were students from Singapore, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Slovakia, Canada, UK, Costa Rica, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Finland, New Zealand, U.A.E, Ghana, and Sweden. There were just some incredible people there, hands down.
When we arrived Wednesday we registered, met some of the other students and EO members, and then got ready for dinner at the Sprint World Headquarters. This was a great opportunity to network with the judges and EO members from around the world and it was incredible to see how much interest they took in the GSEA event. With the presentations the next day, you could feel the excitement building throughout the course of the evening.
The finals started the next morning, and we were split into separate rooms to pitch in front of a panel of semi-final judges to see who would make it to the final round. I really enjoyed listening to other presentations from the students. Unfortunately, BounceFire didn’t make it past the semi-final round but I did receive some great feedback and positivity from people who saw my pitch. Essentially they noted that BounceFire is a super sound business idea, not a “get-rich-quick” business but one that is simple and has long term potential. Sounds good to me, but maybe we will start a fire sooner!
At the end of the day we did some team building workshops while final round was going on. Brent Skoda, originally from Cleveland, Ohio (our home state) represented Texas Christian University well and ended up winning the overall 2010 Global Student Entrepreneur Awards. Be on the lookout for his business, CollegeFittness.com and his new spinoff company that was announced at the conference. Also keep a close eye on a few others like Daniel Gomez Iniguez at Solben and Hassan Hamdan’s company, Optimal Technology Solutions.
I also got to meet a ton of great people from the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO). Thanks to all of the awesome judges, students and professionals who made this an amazing trip for me! The relationships that were created at this event will mean only great things for the future of BounceFire! I also want to thank Donna Carrigan, Greg Hill, Emily Egan and rest of GSEA for putting on the incredible event.