On Friday, May 3, 10 senior design teams took the stage in DeBaun Auditorium to perform in the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition. Those teams were O2Go, Supercritical Biodiesel, Castle Point Rocketry, The Boring Team, E-Fishin-Sea, SD Marketplace, REDCap ReImagined, Life Skills Software, EVisualize, and MNRVA. In an unprecedented tie, Castle Point Rocketry and Life Skills Software won first. REDCap ReImagined won third, taking home $2,500 while the other two took $7,500.
On stage, each team was given three minutes to pitch their product to a panel of eight judges (and potential investors) before a brief question and answer period. The performances were polished through weeks of coaching and preparation. Teams led with enticing hooks before introducing themselves. Lines were divided among the presenters, who glided around the stage in rehearsed formations. Most teams opted for three presenters. Only Castle Point Rocketry sent out one.
Over the previous five weeks, the teams faced two rounds of elimination. The first round, the quarterfinals, occurred within Senior Innovation (course codes TG 403/404), for which participation in the competition is mandatory. Of the original 188 teams, a third of them, plus 10 teams who gathered the most likes on social media, progressed to the semifinals. The semifinals, which took place a week before May 3, hosted the same panel of outside judges as the finals.
This year’s judges were Tom Blum of New York Angels; Marques Brownlee, a tech-review YouTuber and ’15 alumnus of Stevens; Shane Deaton of Tesla; Kristina Hahn of Google; Doug Kennedy of Studio Wildcard; Dawn Ortell of Johnson & Johnson (a ’77 alumna); Leigh Ann Soltysiak of SilverLeaf Consulting; and Zakiya Smith Ellis, the New Jersey Secretary of Higher Education.
The Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition, formerly known as the Elevator Pitch Competition, earned its new name this year after the Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation established a perpetual endowment to provide $17,500 each year in prize money for the top three competitors.
The competition intended to cap off the Senior Design Expo, which has been open to all four schools of the university since 2012. According to Sandra Clavijo, who had an integral role in the competition as Director of Core Education for the SES Center for Student Success, “the former provost had wanted all students to learn how to pitch and decided to make it [the competition] mandatory. These skills are highly valued not only by ABET but also the companies that recruit at Stevens.” Those skills, said Clavijo, who also coached and mentored first place team Castle Point Rocketry and third place team REDCap ReImagined, are “opportunity recognition, value proposition, communication.”
The projects of the three winning teams had little overlap. Castle Point Rocketry, recognizing a demand for the ability to perform research in outer space, pitched a reusable rocket service to send experiments to space for cheaper than currently available services. In their pitch, Faris Ibrahim, who took the stage alone, highlighted that this would specifically increase research opportunities for schools and small businesses. The team included seniors Nathan Tahbaz (Mechanical Engineering), Monica Traupmann (Chemical Engineering), Dakota Van Deursen (Chemical Engineering), Abraham Edens (Mechanical Engineering), William Skwirut (Mechanical Engineering), Faris Ibrahim (Computer Engineering), Ben Iofel (Computer Science), and Thomas Flaherty (Mechanical Engineering). At the time of the competition, they had raised over $500,000 from crowdfunding and 12 major corporate sponsors and intended to launch from a site in New Mexico in June. According to Van Deursen, every team member decided to give their cut of the $7,500 back to the team to buy the next round of parts and solidify the launch site.
Life Skills Software, which tied for first, seeks to address a gap in the education of special needs children by developing a suite of games meant to develop real-world skills. The software will also allow parents and teachers to monitor analytics on child performance via a Teacher Portal. The team included seniors Nick Gattuso III (Co-founder and Developer), Mary McKeon (Co-founder and Developer), Khayyam Saleem (Lead Developer), Robert Spillane (Research Analyst), and Jarrod Smeyers (Game Developer). According to McKeon, the idea for the project dates back to high school, when “Nick saw a lack of software solutions for the skills they were teaching, and asked if our computer science class could program games for the students instead of programming random applications. After the success in our individual classroom, and after we went to Stevens, we decided to expand on this idea, and joined the Stevens Venture Center in December 2017.” McKeon thanked Adrienne Choma, Michael DiStefano, and Michael Parfett of the Venture Center for their mentorship. So far, Life Skills Software offers eight games and plans to expand its library.
In third place, REDCap ReImagined pitched a professional service to revamp the way hospitals manage patient data, based on the existing data-collection software REDCap, which thousands of hospitals and institutions already use. By creating tailored solutions that streamline nurses’ handling of data, the team estimates they will reduce time spent on record-keeping at Hackensack Meridian Health by five hours per week, which would save Joseph M. Sanzari Children’s Hospital $100,000 per year. The hospital, less than an hour north of Stevens, is REDCap Reimagined’s first client. The team includes Engineering Management seniors Samantha Nicolich, Nathan Schaefer, and Kiera Sheridan.
The winning competitors shared the sentiment that the event was a healthy mix of competition and collaboration. According to Sheridan, “there was really a camaraderie between the teams. No one wanted to win by someone else not performing well. We all wanted it to be a true competition of Stevens’ best.”
For many of the teams that did not place in the top three, the road for their projects is still open. According to Raul Arora of MNRVA, who ranked first in the semi-finals with a text summarization algorithm based on natural language processing, “this competition doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, and we are planning on continuing the project after we graduate.” Sam Ferreras of O2Go, who pitched a portable, tankless oxygen device, said “our plan is to actually start a company focused on accessibility devices by disabled people for disabled people. I was surprised that we made it to the finals, and I worked hard to practice my pitch, but it was secondary because we already had a business model.”
The judges, for their part, were pleased. “I’m just so impressed by the dedication and the capability of the students. With the tools that the students have available to them, there are things you can do in hours that we couldn’t have completed in a whole semester,” said Dawn Ortell, a ’77 graduate of Stevens and a Business Planning Mentor at Johnson & Johnson. Marques Brownlee, a popular YouTube icon at Stevens who graduated from the university in 2015, said, “I’m motivated by the young talent. I was horrible at presentations when I was 21, so seeing students dominate them is inspiring.”
When asked what is the most valuable aspect of the competition for students, Clavijo responded, “I honestly think it is confidence they gain from presenting in public. I also think it is the power to believe in yourself and see the value in your project and engineering work. And competing in anything raises the bar. Students start caring more about their projects as they quantify and communicate their value.”
More information on the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition and the Senior Design Expo can be found under the Research & Entrepreneurship section of the Stevens website.
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