Here’s the pitch: UW students go into a room with key investors to share their first AI ideas
It was a great night at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle on Wednesday as University of Washington students pitched their startup plans in front of some of the city’s most influential venture capitalists.
The event was the culmination of a 10-week class – “Entrepreneurship: Building a Company from Inception to Successful Exit” – where students were taught to create a business plan, pitch, and product demo.
The program is taught by venture capitalist Greg Gottesman, founder and managing director at PSL, and Ed Lazowska, a longtime professor of computer science at the UW. Every quarter, the class attracts a “who’s who” of guests from Seattle’s tech industry, including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, and Zillow and Expedia founder Rich Barton.
The seven teams include 67 undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of fields including business, computer science, design and more. They create a variety of technology solutions aimed at helping new parents, college students, seniors and many people in between. And everything depends on a healthy dose of artificial intelligence.
The teams met at the PSL offices in Pioneer Square to present their final pitch and answer questions from VCs. This year’s event included a new wrinkle: one round was held in a conference room intended to simulate a real-world meeting, where students were interrupted and interrupted throughout their presentations. Another round of eight-minute matches in front of all the other teams was not interrupted.
“One of the reasons this is fun is that we learn a lot more from the students than they learn from us,” Gottesman told GeekWire. “They are on the cutting edge of using AI, thinking of new solutions to old problems and other new problems.”
Lazowska said the class, which attracted 150 applicants, begins with training and can be like an initial emotional rollercoaster: the vision seems impossible to achieve, pivots happen, and stress sets in. Then, finally, a “miracle” happened. He says the big success is due to the diversity of the majors.
“A big part of it is that those people learn to work together, to learn that each one has something very exciting to offer,” Lazowska said. “And for people in technology, you always think that the technology is what makes the company, and that’s completely wrong in most cases, isn’t it?”
The goal is to have a successful business at the end of the course, and it was clear that the students had achieved that as they discussed go-to-market strategies, the competitive landscape, potential revenue streams, and more. VCs from PSL, Madrona, Flying Fish Ventures, Fuse, Voyager Capital, Ascend and elsewhere provided ideas and advice.
Comments and reactions from readers include:
- Adelin Mah, a second-year computer science student, teamed up with his team Instant Quote, a proposal generator that uses AI to speed up such a process for tradespeople, starting with professional draftsmen. Mah liked that mixing in the classroom put him around people who are already gaining experience at companies including Amazon and Google. “I went into business, not as a job prospect, but just as an interest,” he said. “I built a lot of projects from hackathons and places like that, so I was building, but I wanted to go further.”
- Tanmay Shah, a computer science graduate student who is a software engineer at Uber, was discussing with her team Wayfinder, a tool to help college students (and their parents) stay on top of the application and admissions process. “One of the things I’ve seen in the last few years is that there is a huge opportunity to create your own thing and easily create a frontier in existing markets,” said Shah. “This class is great in terms of taking you from zero to a place where you can pitch your idea to a VC.”
- Avni Rao is a third-year computer science student at UW who also leads a club called cseed. His team, Nurture, was installing a wearable baby monitor designed to collect data on infants’ sleep patterns. “I think I probably learned more from this class than any other class I’ve taken,” Rao said, adding that the experience does a good job of keeping up with the real world and the fast-paced industry.
Second-year MBA Anshula Singh of AuthScript was part of the panel that received the most votes from the judges. AuthScript’s embedded AI agent acts as a smart clinical partner for doctors by securely analyzing patient records in real-time and sending complex pre-authorization forms in seconds.
Singh said their idea addresses “the most difficult administrative problem in health care” regarding pre-authorization, a tactic used by insurance companies to control costs. Alongside co-founder Jessica Hadley, another MBA student with experience in the healthcare field, Singh said the class taught the team to get back on the ground and stay connected to the vision they believe in.
“We faced many challenges,” said Singh. “I think when Greg first heard the idea, he said, ‘Nah, why are you guys doing this?’ We said, ‘No, there is a problem, there is a market, and there are people willing to pay.’
Jacob Colker, founder and managing director of Seattle’s AI2 Incubator, sums up the room’s reaction to AuthScript: “He impressed 17 of Seattle’s top investors.”
His sentiments were echoed by other investors who noted that all the teams will have a second meeting according to the quality of their fields.
