The day was almost done by the time judge Bill Weiss described what he liked about the two ventures awarded $25,000 each in Wednesday’s pitch competition at We Media NYC.
He said the panel of judges picked Pando Projects and Stable Renters because, among other things, they look like they’ll be able to:
- Transform intention into action;
- Leverage a dynamic “that’s already out there”;
- Gain enough traction that, eventually, they’ll scale up to what he termed “a reasonable size”;
- Make a real difference in their ventures with the $25,000 prize money.
More generally, he encouraged all entrepreneurs in the room to pay more attention to the outcomes they hope to achieve, to think internationally and to see if they can build operations that are lean enough to be called “asset-light.”
I believe this is the fourth We Media conference I’ve attended, and some of Weiss’ comments echoed advice that he and others offered at the close of the pitch session back in 2007.
Interestingly, despite intriguing pitches for such locally-rooted projects as FastCast and Neighborhood Pages, Wednesday’s discussions yielded little progress on what Knight Foundation CEO Albert Ibargüen described as an urgent problem at the 2009 gathering: the disconnect between journalism and geography.
The day was packed with useful tips on other fronts, though, and I’ve used Storify to organize tweets around four main topics:
- Becoming an entrepreneur
- Creating a venture
- Pitching a venture
- Convening entrepreneurs
