Paving The Way For Future Women Entrepreneurs | Technovation LA Pitch Night
There’s one thing that I find to be extra inspirational to witness even over watching successful professionals speak about pursuing their passions, and that is to see younger individuals following similar paths to success.
At the Technovation Challenge LA Pitch Night hosted by Iridescent, we saw six teams of high school girls from various Los Angeles City Schools pitch a number of mobile app ideas to a panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Panelist judges Dave Siemer, Eva Ho, and Karen Jashinsky, sat and watched as these six teams of 3-5 girls took the stage and gave a full pitch presentation of what their mobile apps would be. The girls gave their live slideshow pitches with cheeky excitement, using skits and live acting to show the need for their products. Their slideshow presentations addressed a number of questions about their products including target demographics, customer needs, marketing avenues, financial/revenue streams, leading competitors, and etc.
The ambitiously competitive teams were as follows:
- The Brownies, with Epic Tunes, an app aimed at live concert goers, to provide information, show reviews, and access to ticket purchases.
- Team Rise, and their app to help teens manage their budgets and time.
- Tech Nerds, with Tab Attack, a game-based learning system to help teenagers play drums & guitar with the use of tablatures.
- MASKKK the Destroyers and their Kid Tracker App to help parents avoid from letting their children slip through the cracks.
- Techno Unibot Freaks, with In a Flash, a flash card app for students.
And the final two teams with public bus system-based applications for LA commuters:
- Tech Chicks – Guide Me Around: LA
- Musical Gears – BUSavvy
The driven young women (ranging from 10th-12th grade) worked through a nine week period with computer science and business mentors to build their projects out within these three categories:
Technology: Though there were no computer science prerequisites, the girls were tasked with learning and implementing basic object-oriented programming and Google’s App Inventor to code and develop their apps for the Android platform.
Entrepreneurship: Through working with their mentors, each team acted as a startup, conducting market research for their pitch presentations.
User-Centered Design: Not only did they develop and program what they could, they also worked as a group to determine the design and user-experience aspects of their mobile apps. The result, physical mockups and slideshow graphics of their app user interfaces, screenshots, and functionalities.
Once their pitches were done, the young women were put through a business-style gauntlet with a Q&A question from the judges. All smiles of course, the girls were asked more deeply about various aspects of their projects: in-depth marketing strategies, competing edge, etc. Of course, they were also given plenty of good ideas and suggestions to implement in, not just from the judges, but from the audience as well.
The evening was completed with a speech from the Keynote speaker, Lucy Hood, executive director of USC’s Institution for Communication Technology Management. She briefly gave her background to the audience, having been highly successful in the communications technologies field, (was one of the leading executives to implement text voting for FOX entertainment). In her speech, she addressed and motivated these future business women by highlighting the accomplishments of similar colleagues in her field and giving the girls a laundry list of things they would need to do in order to succeed in the future:
- Delve into mathematical and scientific studies as much as possible, but leave room for business knowledge
- Seek out similar academic competitions and programs
- Don’t take no for an answer
- Find a hero
There were two chosen winners among the teams for the evening. The first, a people’s choice award where the audience voted on their favorite. The winners, Techno Unibot Freaks, with In a Flash received a prize courtesy of EA entertainment.
The grand prize winners, discussed, and chosen by the panel of judges would be given a sponsored trip to San Francisco to compete with their app at a national level. The eventual goal, the opportunity to get their app professionally developed to be sold in the Android marketplace. And the winners? MASKKK the Destroyer, with their child tracker application.
