some of the finalists a little better, so I could start to understand where their babies really come from.
Take William Sanchez. He is a born entrepreneur from the Bronx, who previously co-founded Vecarius (which does waste-heat recovery), as well as a Salsa dancing company (teaching and performance), all while working on his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at MIT. He was an MIT undergrad too, and had a hard time adjusting to Boston until he started dancing as a sophomore. “Salsa dancing kept me sane,” he says. Some key lessons from Salsa applied to his startup: “You have to set up right, and know who’s doing what. Also, it’s the passion that led to starting a venture.” People get lost in their 9 to 5 jobs, he says. “I want to bring that to CoolChip—not forgetting what my motivation was.”
Meanwhile, David Jia and Kelvin Sun from Upkast are the prototypical startup founders. An MIT Sloan business guy (Sun) and an MIT computer science undergrad (Jia), the two met a couple years ago through a mutual friend and already have a product out—but they worked hard on their business plan for the competition. (That’s sort of the reverse of many contest entrants, whose products don’t exist yet.) I see Upkast developing into a platform for unifying public, private, and personal clouds, but it will face lots of competition. Sun says the company is pursuing a “freemium” model—free for consumers, and looking to charge businesses. The MIT Media Lab is already using the system.
Speaking of the Media Lab, that’s where Matt Hirsch is doing his Ph.D. His venture, Sensactive, is probably the flashiest of the finalists, in a “Minority Report” sort of way (anyone remember that movie?). The idea is to use a very thin optical sensor behind a phone or tablet’s LCD screen to capture depth information, so you can manipulate medical images or other displays by moving your fingers in front of them. Hirsch sees this becoming a big opportunity, especially with 3-D displays coming out this year. “Multi-touch on a surface is inadequate right now,” he says. “You really need a 3-D interactive device.”
Lastly, Zinaura isn’t flashy, but it could end up having the greatest human impact of all of the entrants—if its epilepsy drug works well for patients. Heather Kline, a Harvard Business School student, told me the drug is already approved for use in China for treating Alzheimer’s disease, so it has been de-risked for toxicology and safety. She made a strong case that epilepsy, which affects some 60 million people worldwide, is a huge opportunity because one-third of patients don’t respond to current medications and another third suffer debilitating side effects. The results in animals are quite advanced and promising, Kline says, so the next step is to move into a Phase I clinical trial.
Now it’s nail-biting time for the finalists. At the end of the night, Metcalfe dispensed some crucial advice to a few of them: “The key thing is to have fun,” he said.
Indeed, that’s true today, and every other day. Good luck to all of those presenting at MIT tonight, and have fun. You’ve earned it.
