Steve Blank: The International Business Model Competition

Being one of the few teams not from BYU, I was initially a bit worried about potential biases in judging. Quite to the contrary, the people at BYU were incredibly kind and welcoming, and made the experience a generally awesome one.

My co-founder and I had the fortune to spend a large part of the weekend with a CS PhD candidate from University College London. He had been a part of Business Plan competitions run in the London area for the last few years, and was effectively sent as an envoy to see the benefit of a Business Model competition. After talking to him and competing in said competition, I've come to realize the underlying benefit: The emphasis on input over output truly puts BYU's competition above the rest in terms of practicality and learning.

As an aside, my co-founder and I make up Gamegnat, the team that took first place at the competition. We're currently exploring options for MVP creation, and would love to talk to anyone with a passion for gaming and web development that may be interested in working with us in a founder (significant equity) or freelancer (cash) capacity. See profile for contact info.

I was at the lunch he mentioned - we have a good startup community here in Utah but it was surprising to see the number of people that showed up to hear him. I hope to see the number of scalable startups in Utah increase over time.

Go utah!

I just moved back to Utah from SF. Thinking about a HN meetup.

http://utahack.com

Anyone interested? Hit up the site and fill out the form.

Also would love to hear of any if you know of any.