The Dare to Dream program, organized by U-M's Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, distributes up to $100,000 each academic year to U-M students. The grants range in size from $500 to $10,000 and help students fund things like feasibility studies, business plan development and elevator pitch practice.

"We think that the student start-up ideas are great vehicles to those entrepreneurial skills," says Paul Kirsch, associate director of the Zell-Lurie Institute and leader of the Dare to Dream program.

This fall, 22 U-M student-led start-ups split $34,500 in seed capital. One of the big winners includes $10,000 to SecureHealing, which specializes in privacy monitoring and reporting across healthcare software systems. Another grant winner is Smart Peru, an all-inclusive Peruvian website, that won a $500 Venture Shaping Grant. Some winners also received invitations to Ann Arbor SPARK's Entrepreneur Boot Camp and $5,000 worth of business consulting.

The Zell-Lurie Institute has offered the Dare to Dream grants since 2002. Many of the start-ups never took off, but some have turned into the darlings of Michigan's entrepreneurial class lately, such as Are You a Human and Own Point of Sale, both of which recently closed more than $1 million in venture backing each.

Source: Paul Kirsch, associate director of the University of Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
News from Concentrate

The Dare to Dream program, organized by U-M's Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, distributes up to $100,000 each academic year to U-M students. The grants range in size from $500 to $10,000 and help students fund things like feasibility studies, business plan development and elevator pitch practice.

"We think that the student start-up ideas are great vehicles to those entrepreneurial skills," says Paul Kirsch, associate director of the Zell-Lurie Institute and leader of the Dare to Dream program.

This fall, 22 U-M student-led start-ups split $34,500 in seed capital. One of the big winners includes $10,000 to SecureHealing, which specializes in privacy monitoring and reporting across healthcare software systems. Another grant winner is Smart Peru, an all-inclusive Peruvian website, that won a $500 Venture Shaping Grant. Some winners also received invitations to Ann Arbor SPARK's Entrepreneur Boot Camp and $5,000 worth of business consulting.

The Zell-Lurie Institute has offered the Dare to Dream grants since 2002. Many of the start-ups never took off, but some have turned into the darlings of Michigan's entrepreneurial class lately, such as Are You a Human and Own Point of Sale, both of which recently closed more than $1 million in venture backing each.

Source: Paul Kirsch, associate director of the University of Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
News from Concentrate

Photo courtesy of San Fransisco Business Times

Noted venture capitalist Tom Baruch offers insight on where we’re  getting it right and what other states can learn from Michigan.

Ann Arbor SPARK’s Entrepreneur Boot Camp is a biannual event that offers two days of business planning and preparation designed to help early stage technology businesses increase their chances for attracting additional funding, finding resources and achieving success. A unique combination of hands-on learning and one-on-one mentoring, the event features nationally noted speakers on entrepreneurship, successful local entrepreneurs and investors.

Applications are due October 1.  Click Here for the Entrepreneur Boot Camp Application Form.

We have been providing this Boot Camp twice a year since 2002.  181 companies have gone through the two day program each paying $1,000 tuition.  Sound like a lot?  We often get that from boot strapping entrepreneurs.  Understandably so.  But time and time again our surveys receive a thumbs up from every participant.  We get comments like it was the best time and money spent at this critical time in their development. 

Do we have hard evidence of a return on that tuition investment?  How about the fact that these campers have raised over $20 million in equity and just under $20 million in grants since their participation in the program.  Sensigen was a Boot Camp company in 2002.  They raised more than a million in private equity and recently sold to Sequenom (SQNM).  Michigan Aerospace attended Boot Camp last year and is building their company with a million dollars of grant money.

You can apply now to attend our next Boot Camp November 5 & 6.  You won’t be the same company coming out of camp as you were going in.  It’s a good investment in yourself.

If you are starting up a new technology company, or spinning one out of your current company, plan now to attend our next camp in October.

One of the critical lessons that Boot Camp teaches is distilling the important elements of your business into a concise two minute presentation or “elevator pitch”. Armed with this tool bootcampers are able to get potential investors attention and (hopefully) secure that important meeting.

Here in South East Michigan, a premier forum for such activity is the Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurship (ACE). Every year ACE holds an elevator pitch competition open to entrepreneurs from around the Great Lakes Region. This year, two former bootcampers – WindSight and In The Groove took home two of the top three places in the competition.

Having worked with both these companies I could see the marked improvement that the Boot Camp expeience had not only on the organization of their elevator pitch but also in their confidence and in their understanding of their own business and the funding process.

By Arcadio D. Ramirez
MI-SBTDC

Everyone with a business idea loves to talk about it.  They talk and talk!  Few actually take action.

At the beginning of 2008 Dylan Imre and I came up with the idea of creating a business around software for prediction markets.  One of the earliest actions we took  was to  attend the Ann Arbor SPARK Boot Camp in the spring of 2008.  And good thing we did! It set us on the path to the success we’ve seen this year. One of the key things you learn at the Boot Camp is to communicate with brevity.  Notice my first sentence.  Brevity forces focus, brevity forces deep thinking, brevity forces difficult choices.  These are the essentials to getting  your business off the ground.  By forcing you to do these things in an intense 2-day period, during which you have access to literally dozens of successful entrepreneurs, Boot Camp can save you several months.  Here’s what it did for us.

Focus – when we came to Boot Camp we had researched Prediction Markets and knew that they had many applications – from predicting election outcomes, to predicting box-office sales during the first weekend after a movie was released, to predicting terrorist attacks.  At Boot Camp, prodded by Anik Ganguly, one of our mentors, we picked Sales Forecasting for large, complex public companies as our initial point of market entry.  That one decision made a lots of subsequent decisions – what to build, who to call, and what to offer – much easier.
Network – in the early stages of building a business nothing is more valuable than talking directly to a potential customer.  Our problem, as 2nd year students at the University of Michigan, was that we did not know anyone at the companies we wanted to target who gave a hoot about sales forecasting.  Fortunately the people at the Boot Camp did. Their generous introductions gave us easy access to some key people whose insight was essential in shaping our product.  Most importantly, as a result of the connections we made at Boot Camp we were able to secure our first pilot project with a key customer.

Execution – the summer after Boot Camp we worked hard to finish the software.  We knew what it had to do; we had a potential customer who was willing to pilot it but we were struggling to finish it on time for the pilot.  Again, because of our Boot Camp connections we found Dylan Barrell, an entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience developing and launching enterprise software products.  He agreed to join our team as CEO and took the “bull by the horns”.  Anik, who had stayed connected to us after Boot Camp, was also very much a part of the team.  This was exactly what we needed because Dylan Imre and I were back in school full time again.  With our expanded team, we completed the software in September, and started the pilot in October.  Our software performed so well in predicting November sales that our pilot customer gave us our first order on Dec 29, 2008!

We went from literally “two guys and a PowerPoint” to completed software and paying customer in 8 months, a feat we could not have managed without the focus, network and execution that SPARK Boot Camp enabled.

Chuck Salley, Kurt Riegger, Ann Arbor SPARK and the dozens of volunteer mentors and drill instructors deserve tremendous credit for starting and continuing the Boot Camp.

By Jonathan Carender (Spring 2008 Boot Camper)

By Kurt Riegger