A team of University of Colorado at Boulder MBA students will compete in the national finals of the Venture Capital Investment Competition to be held April 7-9 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Leeds School of Business team joins seven other teams in the finals, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The winning team will take home $10,000, with second place receiving $5,000 and third place $2,000.
CU-Boulder students Brock Middleton, Jeff Sieracki, Brian Morrow, Blair Brown and Erik Kreider beat teams from Northwestern University, Babson College, Emory University, University of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison at the regional competition to qualify for the finals.
"Reaching the national VCIC finals is a testament to the quality and effort of our MBAs," said Paul Jerde, executive director of the Robert H. and Beverly A. Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, which is sponsoring the CU team. "To compete at the highest level of this nationally recognized competition is an extraordinary achievement and a highlight of the MBA experience."
During the competition, student teams pose as venture capitalists and evaluate business plans from five entrepreneurs seeking funding. Through interviews of the entrepreneurs and their own research, the teams seek answers to numerous questions such as who the company's customers are and how they'll acquire them, and how risky their investment would be, before offering to invest in one or more companies.
The teams' choices are then judged by experienced venture capitalists on how they made their investment decisions.
"VCIC has been a tremendous learning experience," said team member Brown. "Going through the process of evaluating business models is a valuable skill set that we can all use in our post-MBA careers." He added that it was really helpful to see the process of funding a startup company from the perspective of both a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur.
The other finalists include the University of California at Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Pennsylvania.
The CU-Boulder team finished second and won $2,000 in the regional finals held at the University of Texas at Austin in February.
The VCIC competition began in 1998 and was created by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School.