Some say the 15th biannual Pitch was the best one yet. Twelve entrepreneur hopefuls brought polished presentations to the stage to convince both audience and judges that their business idea was worth investing in. While there can only be three official winners, the hosts of the competition, The DALI Lab and Magnuson Center, hope that The Pitch is a launchpad for all contestants.
All Dartmouth community members are encouraged to apply to participate in The Pitch. Diversity in people and ideas is one of the most unique things about the event. Every term applications come in from undergraduates, faculty, staff, DHMC employees, Tuck students, and others. Ideas pitched range from a better machine to cut turf fields, to an ambulance vomit bag that doesn’t leak, to AI that reduces in-classroom bias, to a platform dedicated to the continuity of care for hospital patients.
Once accepted into the contest, the next big hurdle for a pitchee is to stand under the bright stage lights and convey a problem, their solution, and why they are uniquely positioned to bring the solution to fruition. They field live questions from four student judges — two representing the DALI Lab and two from the Magnuson Center — and a question from the audience. Audience buy-in is key. At the end of the night, the audience chooses the winner of the Best Pitch Prize, $1000 in startup funding. The Build Prize and the Startup Prize are chosen by the judges.
Emcee Dorothy Qu ‘19 got things started last Thursday in Collis Common Ground (PC: Tim Tregubov)
Stakes are high, but the event last Thursday wasn’t all straight-faced. Good humor was pervasive throughout the evening, the highpoint being Casual Thursday’s performance. While the judges deliberated in another room, the student improv comedy group had the audience in stitches with their irreverent interpretation of the pitches.
Best Pitch was awarded to Lindsey Weiss and Harriet Partridge of BetterBra. They are supporting moms everywhere and developing a bra that fits throughout the entire breastfeeding journey. The prototype is almost finished and they are moving on to start testing in the next few weeks. They hope for a soft launch by the end of the summer. The capital gained from the Pitch Prize will be used to move forward in the manufacturing process.
Chase Yakaboski took home the Build Prize with Aerial Burial, a drone-based memorialization platform. The platform provides an opportunity for relatives to legally and safely scatter the ashes of their loved ones in a respectful, affordable, and meaningful fashion. The Build Prize grants Yakaboski one term of working with a full team of DALI developers and designers to build out the platform in preparation for live testing.
The Startup Prize provides the winner with $1000 and startup support from the Magnuson Center. Amogha Tadimety and Alison Burklund won the Startup Prize for Nanopathdx, a rapid, portable diagnostic platform for infectious diseases. The goal is rapid pathogen identification, a process that is essential to determine the correct antibiotic treatment for sepsis, but one that currently is incredibly time-consuming.
At this celebration of entrepreneurial thinking on campus, the path towards launching an idea is demystified. The audience sees their classmates and professors on stage, some with purely conceptual ideas, others with prototypes or already in production. The Pitch brings awareness to the huge, fascinating range of ideas sparked around campus in research labs, dorm rooms, and FoCo lines, and provides the momentum for these ideas to become something meaningful.