A Word About ITEC

For those of you who don't know, and I'm sure many of you don't because it's entirely unimportant: ITEC (The Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization) is a program in conjunction with my and Chin's alma mater, Boston University, that helps budding entrepreneurs start up their businesses. Every year ITEC hosts a business plan competition, whereby three teams are chosen to present to a panel of venture capitalists their start-up proposals. The grand prize is $50,000. I have entered this competition twice now -- once last year for a web-venture and this year, for saus. We submitted our business plan and hoped for (and expected) the best.

Here is the email I received today from ITEC:

Thank you for participating in the ITEC $50K Business Plan Competition. This year we received many very impressive business plans. Picking the top finalists was more challenging than ever before. While the judges were impressed with your plan, they did not feel confident that it is ready yet to go to the next round in the Competition.

We thank you for sharing your plan with us and wish you the best of luck with your business. You will be receiving specific feedback from the judges next week. In the meantime, we encourage you to continue participating in ITEC events and look forward to seeing you at the Business Plan Competition on Wednesday, April 8 at the School of Management.

Of course, we continue to be available to help you with growing your business. Please do not hesitate to contact us for support.

No, ITEC, no you will not see me, nor any of my teammates, at the competition on April 8th. I will be too busy watching Lost after a long hard day of renovating our space and smoking tobacco with our investor dollars (oh calm down, just Washington). Am I bitter? Heck yes. We didn't make it because we are not the right kind of company. It's time we dispel the negative stigma surrounding restaurants. There are outrageous statistics out there that claim something like 90% of restaurants fail in their first year - this is completely untrue. I bet I can take a handful of quick-serve restaurant concepts and a handful of software concepts and find that the two are equally profitable, if not one more successful than the other (restaurants).