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Main > Entrant Information > Y2K Competition |
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Congratulations to Y2K Winners and Runners Up!
1st Place - Helix Therapeutics, Inc.
2nd Place - Allied Polymer, Inc.
3rd Place - The Good Fish
1st Runner Up - FlexForecast
2nd Runner Up - Live Well
3rd Runner Up - Energy $ave
What is the Y2K?
The Y2K Competition is an easy-to-enter warm-up round for the Y50K Business Plan Competition in the Spring semester. The Y2K entry consists of a short, written description of the market opportunity for your service or product, the product or services concept, your competitive advantage, and brief descriptions of the skills, achievements and other qualities that you and any team members bring to the process of creating a new company.
The Y2K competition is designed to help you generate ideas and begin to build a team for the Y50K. Entering the Y2K, is a great way to get a head start on the Y50K because you will have valuable feedback from professionals about your business idea. It will also help you identify areas that you need to focus your work on the Y50k on.
What is the Y50K Competition?
The Y50K, Yale?s annual business plan competition, provides a year-long program of educational, networking, and mentorship opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs, with the primary objective of new venture creation - getting great ideas out of the lab or dorm room and into the real world. Teams write business plans and compete for $50,000 in cash.
What are the prizes for the Y2K competition?
A cash prize fund of $2,000 will be split among winning entries as follows:
| 1st Place |
$1,000 |
| 2nd Place |
$500 |
| 3rd Place |
$500 |
Furthermore, the top 5 teams will automatically advance to the second round of the Y50K.
How does the judging work?
A panel of judges from the Yale and New Haven venture communities, including experienced entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, legal professionals, and patent expert reads the entries. Some general criteria used by industry, private investors, and venture capitalists in evaluating the attractiveness of new venture opportunities are:
- High growth potential
- Originality of any new technology
- Feasibility
- Market leadership potential
- Quality and breadth of team
- Well defined market opportunity
- Ability to withstand competition
- Written quality of the entry
Who is eligible?
All full-time and part-time Yale students, staff, and faculty at all levels of education and from any department, registered in the current semester of the Competition (Fall 2005), are eligible to enter. People that do not meet this requirement may join or form teams, provided that at least one of the principal contestants on the team is a current Yale student, staff, or faculty member. Teams are encouraged to seek the involvement of Yale faculty, alumni, post-docs, researchers, staff, students from other schools, and people from outside the Yale community. Entries must be the original work of entrants and may be entered by an individual or a multi-member team. The size of a team is not restricted, and neither is the number of entries submitted by a team or an individual. Teams that have already secured arrangements for capital from any source must disclose the amounts and sources clearly in their entries. The Judging Panel of the Y2K Competition reserves the right to disqualify any entry that in its judgment violates the letter or the spirit of the competition Guidelines.
What do I include in my entry?
You may submit a executive summary with a maximum of 1200 words describing your business idea. Keep in mind that the judges appreciate brevity and clarity. Entries must be submitted via the Y2K website. Some elements of an executive summary are:
- Public Summary: How would you describe your idea to the public? Do not disclose any proprietary information or technology.
- Opportunity Statement: How would you describe the business to a potential investor, team member or customer if you had only a short elevator ride to share together? Use one to three sentences.
- Market opportunity and Strategy: What existing problem(s) will you solve with your service or product? What are the primary benefits to customers? What is the level of potential sales of your product or service? How will these sales happen? Who will you first customer(s) be?
- Product and Services: Who will the competitors be? How will you sell your product or service? Where does your revenue come from? Develop a brief concept statement for the product or service that can be shown to potential customers.
- Market Analysis: Who will the competitors be? How will your service or product compare to those of your competitors in terms of usefulness, cost, styling, ergonomics, time-to-market, strategic alliance, technological innovations, compatibility with related products, etc? How large is your target market and how will you reach the consumer?
- Financial Plan: Projections on the financial needs and projected revenues of the venture.
- Management: Include a summary of each team member?s background applicable to the proposed venture. If the full team is not assembled, include a description of the desired background and skills of the team members remaining to be recruited.
- Entry Agreement: Available on-line (coming soon!). Should be filled out and submitted with your entry.
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