Press release from UC Davis

Ensembles, Mesolytics Share First Place in Business Plan Competition

May 18, 2006

Two start-up companies -- one that helps busy families prepare nutritious, home-cooked meals and a biomedical venture that is developing a handheld diagnostic tool for health care professionals -- each have won $10,000 in a business plan competition at the University of California, Davis.

Ensembles LLC of San Ramon and Mesolytics of Davis shared the first place award in the sixth annual Big Bang! Business Plan Competition, organized by MBA students of the Graduate School of Management to promote entrepreneurship, innovation and hands-on learning.

Both top winners aim to capitalize on an underserved need for convenience, speed and efficiency in their market niche. Visitors to Ensembles, which will open its first store in San Ramon on May 31, will be able to create 8 to 14 healthy, ready-to-cook meals that are personalized to their family's tastes. The company says customers can save hours of shopping, preparation and clean-up time. The team members are co-owners Juliet Hodder, a candidate in the UC Davis Bay Area MBA program, Leslie Leach and executive chef Ann-Marie Ramo.

Hodder said the advice and feedback from mentors and judges they met through the competition have been invaluable for mapping the future growth of the company.

"What the Big Bang! experience has helped us do is to think big and allowed us to move beyond our first store, which is really easy to get wrapped up into," said Hodder. "It's pushed us out of our initial go-to-market bubble and made us think beyond our first few milestones."

Mesolytics hopes to give health care professionals a portable tool to quickly diagnose medical ailments using a swab of patients' saliva or drop of blood. The platform is based on nanowire technology proven to detect a single virus with laboratory sensitivity. Disposable test cartridges will target influenza, including the H5N1 "avian flu" subtype. Future efforts will address other respiratory ailments, HIV and common sexually transmitted diseases, and biosecurity hazards such as exposure to anthrax and plague. The team hopes to set up its manufacturing in West Sacramento. Team members are Zane Starkewolfe and Dan Masiel, both graduate students in chemistry at UC Davis; and two UC Davis alumni -- Kara Schmelzer, who has a doctorate in pharmacology, and Farley Stewart, who has a master's in business administration.

"We were able to bring together physics, chemistry, bioelectrical engineering plus the management capability all to form a team, which would not have been possible without the UC Davis Little Bang and Big Bang! competitions," said Stewart. "It's a great example of campus researchers and MBA students coming together in a powerful way."

A panel of eight judges -- mostly venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from the Sacramento region and the Bay Area -- served as judges and selected the two winners to share the total prize money for first ($15,000) and second ($5,000) places. Results were announced at a campus event Wednesday evening.

"There was a nice spread here of different types of finalists -- consumer product, food sciences, electronic design automation, biomedical and nanotechnology, which is a much broader engagement into the university's technology community," said Harry Laswell, general partner of American River Ventures in Roseville. Laswell, who had judged the first three competitions, said he has seen a significant improvement in the quality of the business plans and the preparation of the presenters.

"For the first time, we have a field of teams in the Big Bang! that are going to get funded, some may be funded by angel investors, maybe one or two will actually be venture capital-funded," said Scott Lenet, another judge and the managing director of venture capital firm DFJ Frontier in West Sacramento. "It speaks well to what is happening here at UC Davis.

"In particular, Ensembles is demonstrating that without a lot of resources they've been able to make a lot of progress and demonstrate their commitment to doing this with their own money -- they're real entrepreneurs," Lenet said.

"Mesolytics is based on core UC Davis science that is hard to duplicate," Lenet added. "It's really interesting technology that could fill a real need in the point-of-care market. It's much harder to see how successful they are going to be because there's a lot of competition chasing that market and getting the business side of it right is a challenge."

SmartMomsCircle of Sacramento won the People's Choice award and $2,000 as the audience's favorite after a second round of presentations Wednesday evening. The company plans to build an online community for stay-at-home parents who want to keep up with their careers. The Web site will enable parents looking after young children at home to network and get work, increasing their income and making for an easier adjustment when they return to full-time jobs. Team members are Rose Elley, Elena Naderi and Alexander Vanderbilt, all UC Davis alumni; Jason Montgomery, a junior economics major at UC Davis; Laura Iriarte and Garrett Wilson.

The three other Big Bang! finalists were:

• SOYum!, a manufacturer of a soy-based substitute for eggs and milk. SOYum! could be used by health-conscious consumers to produce healthier food lower in cholesterol and saturated fats, and by people who have allergies to eggs or dairy products. The team members are Mark Gannon, an MBA candidate at UC Davis, and Brad Olsen, Laura Pallas and Marco Garcia, all graduate students in the Department of Food Science and Technology at UC Davis.
• New software for improving the design of microchips is the business objective of Innovative Design Automation (IDA), founded by Jorge Campos, a doctoral student in electrical engineering at UC Davis, and MBA candidates Brian Hoblit and Benedict Mok. Taking a lead from evolutionary biology, their product aims to use random changes and selection to reduce semiconductor chip development time and costs by up to 30 percent.
• Nova Chemicals aims to develop and sell new types of materials for packaging microelectronic circuit boards. The new materials have better physical properties and are more reliable than current products on the market, and could reduce packing time by almost 50 percent. Team members are Dakota Coe, an MBA/JD candidate at UC Davis, and Frank F. Shi.

Pramod Parihar, an MBA student and chair of the competition, said, "The quality of the business plans this year were superb and the connections that have been made are a testament to the goal of the Big Bang! Many of the teams represent partnerships between Graduate School of Management students and alumni and world-class UC Davis scientists and researchers."

"Big Bang! and the Graduate School of Management remain committed to spreading the entrepreneurial spirit, both on campus and throughout the region," he said.

After the competition's launch in October, MBA students from the management school organized a series of workshops to help competitors craft business plans based on marketable ideas. Topics ranged from protecting intellectual property to financial planning.

For the second consecutive year, Big Bang! coordinated with UC Davis CONNECT Business Development, a campus program that supports the commercialization of UC Davis technologies, to hold a series of five "Little Bang" poster competitions designed to encourage more campus scientists to explore the market potential for their research. More than 20 teams participated in the Little Bang competitions, which serve as a stepping stone to the Big Bang!

Four of the Big Bang! finalists -- Nova Chemicals, IDA, Mesolytics and SOYum! -- took part in the "Little Bang" poster competitions held in February. In that competition, SOYum! and Mesolytics were winners in the "Foods for Health and Wellness" and "Nanotechnology" categories, respectively. Nova Chemicals and IDA tied as runners-up in the "Computational Science and Information Technology" category.

From among 14 Big Bang! teams that submitted executive summaries of their business plans, 12 qualifiers were asked to submit complete business plans in mid-April. After a review of the business plans, six teams were selected to make 12-minute presentations before judges Wednesday afternoon and a second eight-minute presentation before a public audience Wednesday evening.

Throughout the competition, judges were asked to evaluate the summaries, plans and presentations as they would for ventures funded by their own firms. In addition to Laswell and Lenet, the final judging panel included: Kevin Coyle, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary; John Hamer, Burrill & Company; Andrew Hargadon, associate professor at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management; Javed Iqbal, angel investor and entrepreneur; Dan Lankford, Capital Valley Ventures; Harry Laswell, American River Ventures; Scott Lenet, DFJ Frontier; and Carl Schwedler, McDonough Holland & Allen PC.

About 55 firms provided financial sponsorship or their representatives led workshops, groomed teams or judged the competition.

The lead sponsor was DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary. Major sponsors included the UC Davis Medical Center, DFJ Frontier and Arête Therapeutics. Other sponsors included CleanStart, Fenwick & West, FedEx Kinko's, Akers Capital, American River Ventures, Capital Valley Ventures, First US Community Credit Union, McDonough Holland & Allen, Javed Iqbal, and the Associated Students of Management at UC Davis.

For more information on the competition, visit the Big Bang! Web site at http://bigbang.gsm.ucdavis.edu.

Established in 1981, the UC Davis Graduate School of Management provides management education to nearly 400 students enrolled in Daytime MBA and Working Professional MBA programs on the UC Davis campus, in Sacramento, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. It also offers a technology management minor degree program for undergraduates and business development programs in which doctoral science students develop skills to commercialize research.

Press release from UC Davis
By:

University of California, Davis - May 16, 2003

A biopharmaceutical company developing a breakthrough treatment to prevent the spread of cancer by putting tumor cells on a low-carb diet has won $10,000 in a business plan competition organized by MBA students at the University of California, Davis.

SialoGen Therapeutics Inc. of Davis won first place in the third annual Big Bang! Business Plan Competition, designed by the students of the Graduate School of Management to promote entrepreneurship, innovation and hands-on learning.

SialoGen has patented chemical technology that shuts down the production of enzymes that make polysialic acid, a sugar polymer found on the surface of cancer cells. It's thought that the presence of the carbohydrate allows tumor cells to rapidly multiply and expand. SialoGen has already identified one inhibitor that will work and could lead to a future cancer therapy.

Team members are Brian Rogers, a UC Davis Graduate School of Management alumnus and adjunct professor; Frederic Troy, a professor in the UC Davis School of Medicine; Jaqueline Gervay-Hague, a professor of chemistry at UC Davis; Sandra Reynoso, a Ph.D. in immunology from UC Davis and MBA student; and Neil Byzick, an MBA student at UC Davis.

A panel of nine venture capitalists from the Sacramento region and the Bay Area, including two UC Davis alumni, served as judges and selected the first- and second-place winners in the final round. Results were announced at the final event of the competition on campus Thursday evening.

"This $10,000 is our lucky charm. We need to go out and raise close to a half-million dollars to launch the business, but this is a beginning for us," said Sandra Reynoso, COO of the winning team. "This competition is not about the money. All the feedback that we have received has been invaluable. I was taken aback when two venture capitalists and an angel investor who judged our presentation approached me and offered their help. I didn't have to move. I was excited that people were coming up to me saying that we want UC Davis to be successful in starting companies."

"In SialoGen we found a start-up with an intriguing new hypothesis on the molecular cause of invading cancer cells, and more importantly, the drug candidates to treat cancer based on this novel idea," said Brian Atwood, a managing director of Versant Ventures in Menlo Park and a UC Davis alumnus. "Their scientific work and business plan were first rate, and the judges were impressed with the SialoGen team."

Second place and $3,000 was awarded to Inventra of Davis, which focuses on innovative prosthetic valve technology and has developed the Active Response Valve for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. Team members are Dr. Michael Dake, Chris Elkins, Karoon Monfared, Bassel Rifai, Ceron Rhee, Dr. Jacob Waugh and UC Davis undergraduate Lana Chan.

As the audience's favorite, Davis BioPharma of Davis won the People's Choice award and $2,000. The company has developed technology that more quickly screens compounds leading to the discovery and identification of new drugs, with an emphasis on those used in the treatment of cancer.

Team members are Paul Yu-Yang, an MBA and doctoral student at UC Davis; Suzanne Miyamoto, a research assistant at the UC Davis School of Medicine; Alan Lehman, a post-doctoral scholar at the UC Davis Medical Center; Jeff Doherty, an MBA student at UC Davis; Alicia Jerome, an MBA student; Young Lee, a doctoral candidate; Flore Look, a law student; and Kit Lam, a professor and chief of hematology/oncology at the medical center.

The other finalist team was Applied Microsensors Inc. of Oakland, which is promoting sensors that will allow farms to remotely monitor their crop's health with real-time data on temperature, humidity and light intensity. Team members are Sparky Rose; , a UC Davis master's graduate and doctoral candidate; Michael Guddal, a master's graduate of UC Davis; and Mark Chang, a graduate of UC Davis.

Matthew Weeks, co-chair of the competition, said the organizing team was pleased with the level and breadth of competitors this year. "As a direct result of our increased outreach efforts, we've seen increased participation from across the UC Davis campus, including more GSM student teams and biotechnology and engineering," said Weeks.

"The Big Bang! is building closer ties between investors and the academic community," added co-Chair Corinna Krueger. "This gives financiers early access to innovative research and technology investment opportunities originating at UC Davis, particularly in the life sciences."

After the competition's launch in October, students from the management school organized a series of workshops to help competitors craft business plans based on marketable ideas.

More than 40 teams submitted executive summaries of their business plans in two rounds: a November warm-up round and a final deadline in February. Eleven qualifiers were asked to submit complete business plans in March. Following a review of the business plans, four teams were selected to make 15-minute presentations before judges Wednesday and before a public audience Thursday.

Throughout the competition, judges were asked to evaluate the summaries, plans and presentations as they would for ventures funded by their firms. The final judging panel included: Gilles Attia of Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich in Sacramento; Brian Atwood of Versant Ventures in Menlo Park; Barry Selick from Sofinnova Ventures in San Francisco; Bill Lanfri from Accel Partners in Palo Alto; David Aslin from 3i in Palo Alto; Cynthia Posehn from the Sacramento Angels; Roger Akers from Akers Capital in Fair Oaks; Harry Laswell from American River Ventures in Roseville; and Pete Bernardoni from Technology Funding in El Dorado Hills.

About 25 firms provided financial sponsorship, led workshops, groomed the teams or judged the competition.

Major sponsors include the Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich law firm, Lightsource Creative Communications and Versant Ventures. Other sponsors include the Fenwich & West law firm; Sofinnova Ventures, Kinko's, William Lanfri and Bank of Sacramento.

About the UC Davis Graduate School of Management

The UC Davis Graduate School of Management has been ranked among the nation's top 20 public MBA Programs and in the top 50 public and private Graduate Business Schools for eight consecutive years by U.S. News & World Report. The UC Davis MBA program ranked 15th among public institutions and 35th overall in the latest U.S. News survey.

Additional information:

• Big Bang! Web site
• Media contact(s): - Lisa Lapin, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-9842,
• Additional contact(s):
  • Tim Akin, Graduate School of Management, (530) 752-7362,
  • Matthew Weeks, Big Bang Co-Chair, (209) 406 4803,
  • Corinna Krueger, Big Bang Co-Chair, (916) 532 1744,

Congratulations to all the team members! You have been selected to proceed to the final judging to compete among the following five teams:

• Davis BioPharma
• Inventra Valve
• Applied Microsensors
• Sialogen
• Solid Oxide Systems

Some upcoming dates you should be aware of as contestants:

• April 30th, 6 to 9 pm, Dry Run Panel:
  we will have you run through your company pitch, with professional feedback on how to improve the quality of your presentation.
• If you have agreed to be a final round judge, May 14th will be the final judging round at One Capital Mall in Sacramento. Teams will give their final company pitch before a panel of approximately 12 VC’s and other investment professionals. The sessions are closed to the public and other teams: only our judges will be present. Keep in mind that for some of these judges, this is the first time they have seen your plan. We ask you to provide a REVISED EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (by April 30th) for this event, as well as sending any revisions to the full plan.
• The evening of May 14th, will be the Big Bang! Reception and cocktail party at Embassy Suites in Sacramento for two members of your team, to circulate with our judges and VIP’s. You should be receiving your invitations shortly. Hope to see you there!
• May 15th, 6 to 9 pm: Teams will give a shortened version of their pitch to a public audience at the UC Davis campus. Presentations should be 10 minutes, focusing mainly the business proposition without technical details or intellectual property issues. Winners will be announced, and awards totaling $15,000 will be awarded. The ceremony will be held at the Buehler Alumni Center, UC Davis.

We will be contacting you in the interim with more details for these three upcoming events.
Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions.

Best regards,

Matthew Weeks, Big Bang! Co-chair    &
Carol Chang, VP of Judging

As co-chair, I want to thank the all the participants in our competition. The following teams are to be congratulated, as based on their executive summaries they have won the title of “semifinalist”!

• Semi-Finalists
• Davis BioPharma
• Inventra Valve
• MicroWeatherStation
• Pacific Telecom Networks
• Sialogen
• Simusoft 3D Productions
• Solid Oxide Systems

Semifinalists are invited to begin working on a full business plan. We will put you in contact with one of our judges who has volunteered to mentor a team in the process. Your team has this opportunity to have professional mentorship; please let us know if due to location or other constraints you cannot meet with your mentor. We may be able to arrange an alternate.

Some dates you should be aware of:

• Friday, April 4th: Your full business plans are due. Length should be 20-25 pages.
• Friday, April 18th: Finalists will be announced.

These teams will give their final company pitch for the prizes to be awarded in May.

A business plan is an essential document not only for raising capital, but also as a roadmap to your start-up’s success. What is the purpose of your business plan financials? How do you determine how much money do you need? How do you to build a financial model? How can you get good cash flow estimates? What is the best way to present the financial projections? Come to the Business Plan Financial Projections Workshop and find out.

The Big Bang!'s Financial Workshop was an outstanding event for anyone with aspirations of starting a business or writing a business plan. VP Marque Cohen of Morgan Stanley clearly outlined how financing has changed in the last few years and how vital accurate forecasting has become for successful business plans. Start-up consultant Matt Upton concentrated on the key financial components of business plans- a five year forecasting of income statements, balance sheets, and cashflows. Every business plan should have exceptional financial modeling with well stated assumptions, clear and concise margins, mistake-free work (watch those Excel equations like a hawk), and realistic analysis of competitors. The event was an excellent summary of the financial attributes necessary for business plans.

If you missed the workshop you can get the highlights by viewing their presentations on these links:
Link to Marque's presentation
Link to Matt's presentation

Bill Joos is the VP of Entrepreneur Development which means he makes valuable investments in entrepreneurs—investing both his time and money – to help guarantee the company’s success by helping entrepreneurs develop their business plan and introduce them to key business and investment partners (Garage focuses on high technology seed-stage companies).

To leave you with a taste of some of the key information Bill provided, here is the list of Ten Biggest Business Plan Mistakes:

1. Too darn long : A great quote from Mark Twain, “I was too busy to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
2. Need more defined positioning: Brief description of the pain and how you’re going to alleviate it.
3. Lack of focus: Don’t try to do all things for all customers.
4. Not enough real world market analysis: Analyze the market from the bottom up (start with your customers).
5. No business “cockpit gauges”: What are the two or three drivers or metrics that matter in your business… only focus on those.
6. Unclear business model: How are you going to make money?
7. Poor or incomplete competitive analysis: You always have competition—do your homework.
8. Weak team information: Rather have an A team with a B idea.
9. Poorly defined leverage point: You can’t do it alone—who are your partners and alliances that are going to accelerate your success?
10. “Goofy” fundamentals that distract: Seek advice from professionals when in any doubt.

Bill Joos was also kind enough to reactivate a usually "unlisted" URL that contains the pdf files for two of the sessions (pdf #2 and #3) that he did. This will be active and available only through the end of this month (February).
Please remember that this is copyrighted information and is being made available only for the individual session attendees' personal and non-commercial use.
(Should a faculty member wish to use any of this content in their classes, they should contact Bill Joos directly about obtaining a copyright release prior to first usage.)

To learn more about this topic, read these articles in Fastcompany "Assume Short Buildings" and "The Horse Race".

The 25-30 people attending this event is now absolutely ready to go out and invent the next "gadget" and know their rights enough to not get ........tricked.

Larry Fox from the Tech Transfer Center at UC Davis was the first person on the podium holding a 30 minute lecture on "What are your rights" on everything from patents and trademarks to plant variation. certificates. The many questions from the audience indicated that people were very interested in the subject matter. Mr. Fox urged people to contact his office for further information. Technology Transfer Center Larry Fox, Director, (530) 757-3436, jlfox@ucdavis.edu Web site: http://ovcr.ucdavis.edu/TTC/Default.html Role: Handles UC Davis patents and related agreements, including invention disclosures, patent applications, licensing agreements, secrecy agreements, material transfer agreements, and other intellectual property issues.
If you missed it or there is something that you want to look up, you can view the Powerpoint presentation from this link.

Next speaker was Peter Leal from Gray Cary he is a Registered Patent Attorney with extensive experience in Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks. Patent Licensing and Software Licensing for complex technologies. Internet Licensing and Technology Development and Manufacturing Agreements. Strategic Intellectual Property Counseling.
For more useful information about patents he suggested visiting the US Patent and Trademark Center's web site. Especially useful is their search engine where you can search by patent number, name or inventor. Mr Leal also provided a folder on intellectual property law for the entrepreneur that was handed out at the meeting. If you are interested in a copy of this (or the other folder "Patent Primer" developed by Gray Cary) there will be copies available in the computer room in AOB IV. If you missed it or there is something that you want to look up, you can view the Powerpoint presentation from this link.

Last speaker of the evening was Jeff Barlow also from Gray Cary, but with a slightly different topic. Mr. Barlow areas' of expertise are; Securities and general corporate matters, public and private offerings, and mergers and acquisitions. He focused on the rights and benefits of different organization entities. How to best organize the company, and also how to best protect the rights of the board and the owners. These were a couple of tough challenges that the members of the audience now stand more prepared for. There may have been a lot of concepts that some of the audience was unfamiliar with before this meeting, but Mr. Barlow maneged to provide us with a very interesting and clear overview. Common stock, preferred stock, all good solutions even for a new-starter-upper as many of the people in the audience were (or soon to be.) So now we are ready to go out and start a C- or an S-corp and we know where to go to get the best ROI. If you missed it or there is something that you want to look up, you can view the Powerpoint presentation from this link.

All in all, yet an interesting workshop event from the Big Bang! group, if you missed this one, make sure you don't miss the next one FEBRUARY 5. Read more about that one on the events page

The Entrepreneurs’ Grill was organized by the Big Bang! Business Plan Competition at UC Davis, organization comprised of MBA students from the Graduate School of Management (GSM). Approximately 85 people attended the event.. In The opening, the GSM Professor Andrew Hargadon urged the contestants to be all ears because pitching your company in front of VCs is something they should learn to do well, in order to secure funds for their start-up companies. Robert B. Dellenbach of Fenwick & West LLP , gave a compact presentation, which contained hints and tips on how to write a business plan and an executive summary (If you missed the Business Plan Writing Workshop, follow this link to the Power Point presentation . The three winners of the Warm-up Round (November – December 2002) were awarded $1,000 checks: Pacific Telecom Networks, SialoGen Therapeutics, Davis BioPharma, Inc., all of Davis, CA. The first three teams to submit their executive summaries received Big Bang! T-shirts.

Our top-notch judges Bill Lanfri, Partner, ACCEL Partners, David Whitney, Consultant, Deloitte & Touche and Mark Harris, Emerging Technology Group, Silicon Valley Bank did not show any mercy , making the event as realistic as possible. The three presenters: Hank Keukenkamp, CEO of Scope IT, John Tupin, CEO of Life Wave, Inc. and Jeff Glass, CEO of MiaVia were grilled until they were very well done and prepared for their next meeting with a potential investor.

We hope that the Entrepreneurs’ Grill inspired all potential contestants to participate in the coming rounds of the Business Plan Competition at UC Davis, starting with the registration and submission of the Executive Summary by the February 19 deadline. We wish them all GOOD LUCK!

December 2002: Warm-up Round Winners

Big Bang! organizers are pleased to announce the winners of the “Best Three” Award in the Warm-up Round of the UC Davis Business Plan Competition. The winning teams represent the best executive summaries among those that were submitted by an early-bird deadline.

The winners of the warm-up round are:

Pacific Telecom Networks, Davis, CA
Sungene Ryang, GSM Class of '04, -UC Davis, Paul Yu-Yang, GSM Class of '04 , UCDavis, H. Victor Yang, Robert Wachel, Mihir Mohanty.

SialoGen Therapeutics, Davis, CA
Brian Rogers, UC Davis (alumnus - class of 2000), Sandra Reynoso, UC Davis (Working Professional Program - GSM), Frederic Troy, ( Professor, School of Medicine, UC Davis), Neil Byzick( Advisor for BigBang Competition (Working Professional Program - GSM ).

Davis BioPharma, Inc., Davis, CA
Paul Yu-Yang, GSM Class of '04, -UC Davis, Jeff Doherty, GSM Class of '04, -UC Davis, Alicia Jerome, GSM Class of '04, -UC Davis, Flore Look, Law School student, Alan Lehman, UCDMC post-doc, Young Lee, UC Davis graduate student.

The three teams were awarded $1,000 each at the Big Bang! Entrepreneur’s Grill on January 23, 2003.

We are happy to announce that we received a total of 19 complete entries in the Warm-up Round of the Big Bang! Business Plan Competition. The following teams were the first to submit their entries and executive summaries, and received Big Bang! T-shirts for all team members listed on the Entry Form:
    1.  Contact: Miguel De Anquin
    2.  Glycoside – contact: Jeff Murrell
    3.  BanqTech Corporation – contact: Lorenzo Billante/Nader Karimi

Approximately 50 potential entrepreneurs attended the Business Plan Writing Workshop on Wednesday, November 13. The workshop was organized by the Big Bang! Business Plan Competition at UC Davis, organization comprised of MBA students from the Graduate School of Management. Robert B. Dellenbach of Fenwick & West LLP , our workshop leader, gave plenty of good advise about writing a business plan and an executive summary, and the workshop ended late in the evening with an extended Q&A session. Mr. Dellenbach has counseled entrepreneurs and investors as a corporate and intellectual property attorney at Fenwick & West LLP since 1989. He has represented more than 100 software, communications, Internet, biotechnology, semiconductor and other technology companies and their investors.
If you missed the workshop, you can download the Power Point presentation from this link.

Standing-room-only @ Big Bang! Launch
More than 140 students, faculty, alumni, investors and business people packed the UC Davis Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center on October 30 to learn more about the Big Bang! competition and hear what it takes to create a successful business plan and how to launch a start-up that can attract venture financing.

Speakers included winners from two previous competitions: Amit Mazumdar, CEO of VisualCalc (PowerPoint presentation), and David Hahn, founder of LabInfo (PowerPoint presentation).
 

October 10, 2002: The Toughest Job You'll Ever Love: the Entrepreneur's Perspective

May 24, 2002, UC Davis News Service

Gradient Design Wins UC Davis Big Bang! Business Plan Competition http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/visitors_center/news/Big_bang_finals_2002.htm

April 27, 2001, UC Davis News Service

UC Davis Business Plan Competition Awards $15,000 http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/visitors_center/news/Big_bang_finals.htm