This morning I headed down to Palo Alto with iPad 2 in hand to check in with students and speakers at the Stanford BASES BT National Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. For this event, more than a hundred student delegates from campuses around the country gathered at Stanford for an intensive weekend of workshops and talks given by leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and and investors; the speaker lineup included such stars as Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, TiVo co-founder Jim Barton, and Twitter director of corporate strategy Elad Gil. On top of all that, students honed their own entrepreneurial ideas in a business plan competition.
I spent a couple of hours talking with student organizers and delegates at the event and listening to a keynote talk by Marissa Mayer, vice president of location and local services at Google. The video below includes interviews with six student teams, as well as an outtake from Mayer’s talk. (I shot and edited the whole thing on the iPad 2 using iMovie.)
I was extremely impressed by the poise, enthusiasm, and sophistication of the student-entrepreneurs, and I’d definitely want to use many of the products and services they’re proposing. BASES, by the way, is the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. It co-organized the event with Business Today, a student-run business publication at Princeton University. It’s the third time the two groups have mounted the bootcamp. Sequoia Capital and a number of other local sponsors picked up the check for the delegates’ travel expenses.
The students featured in the video are Ruby Lee, a sophomore at Stanford and director of BASES; Elizabeth Wessel, a student the University of Pennsylvania, whose entry in the competition was called My Virtual Dressing Room; Nikola Otasevic from MIT, working on a project called Prigli; Margaret-Ann Seger from Olin College, working on Spot; Lynn Wang from Yale University, working on GoodDollar; and John Horn and Wenny Ng of Stanford, working on EcoTrump. You’ll also see Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mark Dempster, marketing partner at Sequioa Capital.
[Update, Monday, April 11, 8:00 am] According to BASES organizer Ruby Lee, the finalists in the E-Bootcamp business plan competition on Sunday were Bookxor, Crowdstory, Didactica, Nuevo, PrintEco, SakDent, Spot, Surveylicious, and University Flex Force. The top three finishers were SakDent, Spot, and Surveylicious.
