Growing Ideas into Operating Enterprises

Let BRIDGES' Venture Coaches' extensive experience and expertise in enterprise formation and funding, strategic planning, management team and organization building, operations and growth strategy and much more to help you take your venture the next level.

 

Roots
Through practical experiential-learning programs like DigitalBridges2.0‘s Middlebury Solutions Group, students are practicing and enriching their experiences while developing support networks for post-Middlebury life. Not surprisingly, being challenged to deliver actionable outcomes is also spawning a growing spirit of risk-taking and entrepreneurship that is expressing itself in growing numbers of Middlebury College students who are exploring their own ideas for new enterprises.

Aspiring software and Web developers, playwrights and novelists, restaurateurs, ecotourism providers, social activists, ski tuners, and science majors wondering how to commercialize their research results are searching for a place where they can test the viability of and possibly even develop their business concepts.

The Middlebury Entrepreneurs Mentoring Service (MEMS) is DigitalBridges2.0’s go-to program for student entrepreneurs. Within MEMS’ structured environment, aspiring founders discover whether their ideas are fleeting hobbies or promising business concepts; and they begin developing the promising ideas into operating enterprises.

MEMS’ mentoring program operates during the College’s January term when the students take only one course, which allows them to focus completely on their venture concepts. Once the students’ business proposals are vetted and approved by DigitalBridges2.0, they are partnered with student coaches and experienced mentors drawn from the venture, management and investing arenas. The student coaches are veterans of the Middlebury Solutions Group program; while the mentors are drawn from College alumni and Vermont’s venture, legal, consultant and investor community.

Students who demonstrate that their concepts have potential to be developed into an operable business are invited to apply to the Middlebury Solutions Group where they can receive the same consulting services offered to Vermont-based clients.

MEMS 2007
January 2007 marks the second time that the MEMS course has been offered as an approved for-credit course. Loosely structured around Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of The Start, hands on exercises and a combination of guest presenters and round-table discussions, students receive a solid foundation in company-building tools and principles.

Our speakers are drawn from our network of Middlebury College alumni, staff, and even parents, as well as local experts who volunteer their time. Each speaker focuses on his or her particular area of expertise and experience, and offers unique insights into the challenges that each student concept might face in the process. This year’s speakers can be found in the syllabus appearing below.

We change gears once each week when we hold a round-table discussion where students share their progress, work collaboratively towards solving vexing problems, and explore how tools and principles learned during the previous weeks can best be used in critically evaluating each others’ ideas.

For a better idea of the concepts covered during the month long course please see the syllabus that follows.

MEMS 2007 Syllabus

DigitalBridges2.0 1022B: Middlebury Entrepreneurs
Syllabus
January 2007

Co-leaders:
David Nicholson ’06.5, Chris Cadwell ’06.5, Jessica MacArtney ‘07

Section 1: Introduction to Strategy and Start-Up Operations

Day 1: Thursday, January 4
• Introduction
• Presentation of business ideas
• Jim Foster, Chairman, President and CEO of Charles River Laboratories: “Entrepreneurship and Business Development”

Day 2: Monday, January 8
• Presentation of the Zero Business Model
• Introduce pitching (example investor pitch from Campus Storage, Inc)
• Brent Sonnek-Schmelz ’98, “Entrepreneurship and the Liberal Arts”

Day 3: Thursday, January 11
• Michael McKenna, Vice President for Communications, Middlebury College
• Introduction to advertising
• Mock product launch

Day 4: Wednesday, January 10
• Three key questions: Who is your customer? What problem are you solving? How are you doing it better than others?
• Class exercises: define customer, define customer experience, mantra, mission statement, positioning statement
• When is your product or service going to be ready for market?
• What are your true fully loaded costs of operations?
• When will you run out of money?

Section 2: Refinement of Business Model/Preparation of Pitches/Further Exposure to Entrepreneurial Environment

Day 5: Tuesday, January 16
• The “Art of Pitching,” (Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start)
• Homework: 1-minute and 10-minute rough draft pitches (with cost structure)
• The “Art of Writing a Business Plan” (Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start)

Day 6: Wednesday, January 17
• Roundtable discussion of progress

Day 7: Thursday, January 18
• Speaker: Tad Powers, Esq. (Intellectual property, accounting, and business structuring)
• Homework: Rough draft of pitch presentation

Section 3: Presentation of Pitches/Further Exposure

Day 8: Tuesday, January 23
• Speaker: Al Spinell EVP, Project Development, Rentricity (presentation of Rentricity’s business model and the shared insight of an entrepreneur)

Day 9: Wednesday, January 24
• Roundtable discussion of progress

Day 10: Thursday, January 25
• Speakers: Andy Rosmeisel and Jake Whitcomb, Founders, Bright Card LLC

Section 4: Wrap-Up

Days 11 & 12: Tuesday, January 30 and Wednesday, January 31
Final presentations to a panel of professional and angel investors and venture capitalists