Tech
Here’s the pitch: UW students get in the room with key investors to share their AI startup ideas
It was a pitch-perfect evening at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle on Wednesday as students from the University of Washington laid out their startup business plans in front of some of the city’s most influential venture capitalists.
The event was the culmination of a 10-week class — “Entrepreneurship: Company-Building from Formation to Successful Exit” — in which students are taught to develop a business plan, pitch, and product demo.
The program is taught by venture capitalist Greg Gottesman, co-founder and managing director at PSL, along with Ed Lazowska, a longtime computer science professor at the UW. Throughout the 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 co-founder Rich Barton.
Seven teams comprising 67 undergraduate and graduate students came from across campus disciplines including business, computer science, design and more. They pitched a variety of tech solutions aimed at helping new parents, college students, seniors and lots of people in between. And everything relied on a healthy dose of artificial intelligence.
The teams gathered at PSL’s Pioneer Square offices to deliver their final pitches and answer questions from VCs. This year’s event included a new wrinkle: one pitch round was held in a conference room meant to mimic a high-stakes, real-world meeting, where students were interrupted and sidetracked throughout their presentations. Another round of eight-minute pitches in front of all the other teams remained uninterrupted.
“One of the reasons that this is so fun is we really do learn a lot more from the students than they even learned from us,” Gottesman told GeekWire. “They’re at the cutting edge of using AI, thinking about new solutions to old problems and some new problems.”
Lazowska said the class, which attracted 150 applicants, starts with coaching and can often mirror the startup emotional rollercoaster: an idea seems unachievable, pivots happen, and depression sets in. Then, by the end, a “miracle” occurs. He attributes much of the success to the diversity of majors.
“A big part of it is those people learning to work together, learning each one has something really exciting to contribute,” Lazowska said. “And for tech people, you always think that tech is what makes a company, and that’s totally wrong in most cases, right?”
The goal is to get to a viable business by the end of the course, and it was clear 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 input and advice.
Ideas and reaction from students included:
- Adelin Mah, a second-year computer science student, pitched with her team Instant Quote, a proposal generator using AI to speed such a process for tradespeople, starting with professional painters. Mah liked how the mix in the class put her alongside people who are already gaining experience at companies including Amazon and Google. “I was really into entrepreneurship, not as a career prospect, but just interest,” she said. “I build a lot of projects from hackathons and places like that, so I was already building, but I wanted to take it a step further.”
- Tanmay Shah, a computer science graduate student who is a software engineer at Uber, was pitching with his team Wayfinder, a tool for helping college students (and their parents) stay on top of the application and admissions process. “One of the things that I’ve realized in the last couple of years is that there is a big opportunity out there to build something of your own and create a wedge very easily into existing markets,” Shah said. “This class is super good in terms of taking you from zero to somewhere where you can actually pitch your idea to a VC.”
- Avni Rao is a third-year computer science major at UW who also leads a club called Computing Community. Her team, Nurture, was pitching a wearable baby monitor designed to collect data on infant sleep patterns. “I think I’ve probably learned the most in 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 an industry that is moving very fast.
Second-year MBA Anshula Singh of AuthScript was part of the pitch that received the most top votes from judges. AuthScript’s embedded AI agent serves as an intelligent clinical partner for physicians by securely analyzing patient records in real-time and submitting complex prior authorization forms in seconds.
Singh said their idea is tackling “the most burdensome administrative problem in healthcare” around prior authorization, a tactic used by insurance companies to control costs. Alongside co-founder Jessica Hadley, another MBA student with experience in the health care sector, Singh said the class taught the team to double down and stay connected to an idea they believed in.
“We faced so many hurdles,” Singh said. “I think the first time that Greg heard the idea, he was like, ‘Nah. Why are you guys doing this?’ And we said, ‘No, there is a problem, there’s a market, and there’s people that are willing to pay.’”
Jacob Colker, co-founder and managing director of Seattle’s AI2 Incubator, summed up the room’s reaction to AuthScript: “You impressed 17 of Seattle’s top investors.”
His sentiment was echoed by other investors, who noted that every team would have earned a second meeting based on the quality of their pitches.