Startups are constantly using biology jargon—phrases like “incubation,” “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” “symbiotic relationships.” I never fully appreciated these analogies until this year, when my team and I became the sleep-deprived but happy parents of Lark Technologies, Inc., or Lark for short.

We have been diligently incubated by many university competitions—kept at a suitable temperature in a thoughtfully constructed mini-ecosystem until we develop enough to be hatched into a fledgling company with a higher likelihood of survival.

I’ve come to think of well-run business plan competitions like the MIT 100K and the Rice International Business Plan Competition as a simulation of reality that helps, ironically, to counterbalance real reality.

For Lark, these competitions provided us with an artificially optimal entrepreneurial ecosystem with project deadlines, project deliverables, mentors, and judges. They created structure, provided a name brand, and supplied a continued sense of urgency and priorities in an otherwise chaotic process.

They also almost killed our company before it hatched. But that’s the beauty of these experiences.

Commitment to an Idea

I started with a problem, an annoyance really, and if it weren’t for the MIT 100K’s Elevator Pitch Competition, I would have never committed to solving that problem by creating a company.

When I moved in with my boyfriend last year, we were already sleep deprived because of our workaholism, so it drove me crazy that he woke me up everyday with his alarm clock an hour before I had to get up. I had a bunch of ideas swimming around in my head about silent alarm clocks, but MIT’s first competition forced me to commit to the best of my half-baked ideas by pushing me in front of an audience for a 60-second Elevator Pitch. That’s how Lark got started.

Momentum

After getting to the top five in the competition, I realized how much my problem resonated with other couples. It gave me a new type of momentum and discipline. Instead of trying to fix our lives with some sort of hack job to deal with the problem ungracefully, my team and I pushed ourselves in defining Lark so that our technology could enable people to wake refreshed everyday.

The Focus After The Unfocus

The PR from the competition brought a flurry of interest, and as our team, product and business was taking shape, I was brainstorming with everyone. It was at once confusing and exciting. “What if Lark also solved snoring, what if Lark was a vibrating watch, what if…” The ideas grew and grew into an amorphous cloud of what the product and company could be.

But maybe these were necessary growing pains.

Through the sifting of all the great and sometimes contradictory advice, I realized a simple truism: Every mentor will have a different opinion, and it is your responsibility as an entrepreneur to be open to these ideas, but not to idealize them.

The benefit of having many mentors is that certain pieces of advice are consistently repeated, and those naturally rise above the white noise. This is why I don’t believe it’s … Next Page »

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You can’t win them all, but you can sure win a few. Ask C-Crete Technologies, the winner of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition this year. Team founder Rouzbeh Shahsavari, a MIT civil engineering PhD candidate, also won the Elevator Pitch Contest segment of the $100K in November for his 60-second pitch of his technology, which is a nanoengineered formula of concrete designed to reduce the carbon emissions that occur in traditional production of the building material. It’s also stronger and cheaper than the concrete already out there.

C-Crete was also a finalist in MIT’s Clean Energy Prize this week, but Stanford University team C3Nano won the $200,000 grand prize, for the transparent electrode technology it says will make photovoltaic solar panels less expensive and more efficient. That prize money was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and NSTAR.

Life sciences track finalist Aukera Therapeutics won the $10,000 audience choice award at tonight’s $100K awards ceremony, for the treatment it’s developing for the neurodegenerative disorder commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, by harnessing a naturally occurring protein that stimulates nerve growth. Wade described the finalist teams in greater detail in a piece earlier this week, so check out his story for a closer look at the other technologies that were in the running. I’m excited to see where C-Crete and Aukera are going, and am hopeful that at least a few other teams will turn into future startup profile subjects for this website.

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Running the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is a lot like running a startup. We spend most of our time raising money. We are underpaid (in fact, we aren’t paid). Day or night, weekday or weekend, the job never really stops. There is very little formal authority (meaning our team has no real reason to listen to us except that they share our passion for promoting entrepreneurship at MIT and beyond). We hope for huge success stories in the form of $100M+ acquisitions and IPOs. And, it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives.

When the MIT $10K launched in 1989-1990, the competition received 54 submissions and awarded $10,000 in prize money. Behind these accomplishments was a founding team of MIT students and faculty with extraordinary vision. The vision: to motivate student entrepreneurs across the MIT campus-engineers, research scientists, MBAs, and more-to share ideas that would wed MIT-borne technologies with promising market opportunities.

Today, the MIT $100K stands out as the premier student-run business plan competition in the world, offering more prize money, networking opportunities, and mentorship to participants than any other student contest. To date, the $100K has produced several huge success stories. Two of the most well known are Akamai, which went public in 1999, and Harmonix, the technology behind Guitar Hero and Rockband, which was acquired by MTV in 2006. In total, 120+ companies have launched out of the $100K and generated market value in excess of $12.5 billion…yes, billion!

In 2009, we attracted 260 team submissions-the most ever across our 6 industry tracks-and distributed nearly $300,000 in prize money. And while we require each team to have an MIT student, almost 30% of our 900 individual entrants were business professionals and another 15% were students from leading universities across the United States. So how have we been able to maintain this momentum?

Every year, the organizing team of the $100K changes, leaving tremendous opportunities for leadership ingenuity but also the challenge of building upon the momentum of previous years. When we became Co-Managing Directors 6 months ago, we knew our first challenge would be to close enough sponsorship money to fund our prizes, events, and operating expenses. Despite it being a recession year, we were able to retain nearly all of our sponsors from 2008 and actually bring a number of new sponsors onboard, including companies that generously provide in-kind services to our finalist teams. For example, this summer, the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC)—the leading provider of office space and services to entrepreneurs-will provide our six $100K finalist teams not only with flexible, cost-effective physical space and services, but also a unique opportunity to meet an impressive mix of entrepreneurs working out of the CIC.

In some sense, the $100K has achieved a tipping point. Through word of mouth and an enormous network of distinguished alumni and supporters, from VCs to law firms to industry leading companies, the $100K now has the brand value to attract a fiercer level of competition each year. And make no mistake, the key driver of the $100K’s future success will be the caliber of teams we attract. This year’s six finalists proved that they are more prepared than ever before to hit the market with game-changing innovations. Watching these incredible teams present at the Finale, we felt like this year’s mission had been accomplished. Tomorrow, we get to work on next year-raising prize money, recruiting teams, and enjoying the best unpaid job we’ve ever had.

(If you would like to learn more about the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and even get ready for next year, please visit www.mit100K.org).

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It’s not every day that someone posts a guest column for Xconomy in the morning and wins $100,000 in the evening. But that’s exactly what happened with Ksplice, which is working on technology that lets computer users install software updates while applications are running, avoiding a system restart and the lost productivity that can come with it. The Cambridge, MA-based company, which consists of four recent MIT graduates and one current student at the Institute, has just won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

This morning, Waseem Daher, Ksplice’s COO and occasional “Chef Executive Officer” (he likes to cook cheeseburgers), posted a guest column in our Forum about the company and its long road to the finals. We had asked him to write the piece figuring it would offer a unique insight into the competition. We didn’t know we were also getting a post from the winning team.

You can read Daher’s post here. He has promised an update, but for now, we’d just like to congratulation him and the Ksplice team.

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The five track winners for the MIT 100K business plan competition were announced on Friday. These teams will compete in the finals on Wednesday, along with the winner of its sister contest, the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition (that team will be announced next Tuesday). All five track winners, and three of the five Energy Prize finalists (all those with MIT ties), gathered Friday night at Bob Metcalfe’s house in the Back Bay for a small celebration of their making it so far.

Metcalfe, now a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners, has hosted a party for the 100K finalists for many years. As is also the tradition, finalists select one team member to stand on the stairs leading to the second floor, while guests gather in the foyer below them to hear their very short (60-second or so) pitches. I’ve been to several of these gatherings, and others that are similar—and always enjoy them. This year, though, the teams seemed to have risen to another level in terms of both their poise and the sophistication of their pitches. For the first time, I came away pretty sure that not only would a few of these plans turns into real businesses, but that one or two might even be significant businesses. (So, hey—remember when Xconomy spotted you.)

Below are my capsule descriptions of the eight finalists (out of some 260 that entered the two competitions), along with a few impressions. Congratulations to all:

—-Ksplice (100K Web/IT track winner): This teams wins the prize for most rarin’ to go, for sure. When someone asked who wanted to start things off, Waseem Daher’s hand shot up as fast as an Olympic badminton player reacting to a smash. What he was so eager to talk about is technology that enables the installation of operating system and application updates on running systems, without the need for rebooting the computer or restarting the application. The initial target market is enterprise systems, where such updates mean downtime and lost productivity, according to Daher. Although Ksplice only works on Linux systems right now, he envisions every operating system and application employing the technology for software updates. Impression: strikes a universal chord in computer users—big potential royalty market.

—YouTea! (100K Product and Services track winner): Urinary tract infections strike 11 percent of women each year, according to team spokesperson Alex Herzlinger. YouTea! has a new way to deliver a preventative medicine through “a low-calorie, great tasting” drink, I guess called YouTea!. The team was also a finalist in the Harvard Business Plan competition, where it said it planned to the deliver YouTea! first in powdered form, then in a bottle. Impression: Big market need, but might consider a new name (I thought they were saying UT, as in the University of Texas, hook ‘em). And, even if it really does taste great, there’s always the question of how many people will take preventative measures in the first place (see Cambridge Eyenovations below).

—Sun Point (Energy prize finalist, winner of renewables category): Eric Cohen described a passive solar tracker, with no motors, gears, or drive train (at least I think I got that right). It goes … Next Page »

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