Khadija Hussain Photo
Krishna Sampath, the program director.
One team aimed to bring playful, toy-like medical equipment to children. Another sought to bring together labs and data scientists. A third wanted to help out soccer moms and truckers alike— by creating an app that would allow them to order food ahead of time, while on the road.
These ideas for new businesses emerged Sunday night in the final round of Startup Weekend: New Haven, sponsored locally by United Illuminating and the Economic Development Corporation.
Ten teams of aspiring entrepreneurs in all competed in the weekend-long event. In the end the toys lost out to the data.
Startup Weekend is an international program for entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners. Startup Weekends take place all around the world, and follow a basic format: Participants pitch their ideas to one another, then form teams around the most popular ideas. The next 54 hours are a frenzy of business model designing, creating, and coding. Each Startup Weekend finishes with presentations in front of local entrepreneurs.
In New Haven Sunday evening those presentations took place at the Yale School of Management on Whitney Avenue. The ten teams gathered to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges, hoping to win potential investors and customers, as well as critical feedback.
The teams were given five minutes each to present their plans. Then the judges had three minutes to answer questions. Although there would be a winner, the mission of the weekend was to bring together talented, aspiring entrepreneurs, to create teams, and even successful businesses, that would last for life.
One such team was the business venture “MediPals,” who had the idea of creating more kid-friendly medical equipment, in order to, “make medicine fun.” Austin Muñoz (pictured), the team’s presenter, spoke about when his sister was diagnosed with type one diabetes. He talked about how she didn’t understand any of the medical supplies that she was given, and that, to a child, they just looked like torture instruments.
Muñoz’s experiences helped him and his teammates to come up with the idea of MediPals, a company that would give medical supplies a makeover with fun characters, making them more appealing for younger patients.
Another team decided to try to resolve one of their own personal problems— waiting in line at fast food stops while on the road. “Frenzy,” as they named their potential app, would allow a customer to order food ahead of time, then pick it up at the next rest stop, without having to wait in line. Frenzy appealed to the judges, too, and the team received second-place recognition.
Tying for second place was Hyve— an app similar to the popular New Haven-based SeeClickFix, which allows you to report issues in your neighborhood to local authorities. When asked how Hyve would compete with SeeClickFix, the team responded that Hyve could be used within buildings, making it more specific to the customer.
The Seqhub team.
In first place came a team who proposed a simple, yet innovative website— “Seqhub”. The group, one of whom is a data scientist, spoke about the “untapped supply of data scientists.” Their site would allow labs to post questions and data that they needed analyzed, to an audience of data scientists, who could then make offers to do the work. The judges were impressed by the idea, and asked to be the first customers. The winners get $15,000 worth of services from Microsoft Bizspark, three months of co-working space at the Grove, and a private mentoring dinner with three local entrepreneurs.
At the end of the event, the ideas were still flowing, and the teams were making plans for their potential businesses. You saw them here first— the future entrepreneurs ready to take New Haven by storm.
