It wouldn’t be the year of two-oh-one-five if every other starry-eyed kid with an app idea didn’t have entrepreneurial aspirations of being the next Mark Zuckerberg, or, at the very least, the next Ruslan Kogan (career goals: a successful business named after yourself).
Trouble is, getting those business ideas from ‘chats over drinks’ stage to ‘actually operational’ is tricky, to say the least.
So in the spirit of fostering young talent (i.e. you), ride-service / kitten-deliverer Uber has teamed up with Aussie entrepreneur Mark Bouris to launch UberPITCH, a one-day event putting start-up founders and entrepreneurs face-to-face with business leaders… in the back of a cab.
“The point is that younger people, particularly people in their 30s or lower than their 30s, have these great, innovative ideas, and are really enthusiastic and they’ve got masses of energy, and a new start-up requires lots of energy,” Bouris says in the promo vid (from the back of a taxi because we’re SETTING THE SCENE HERE, PEOPLE).
“These guys and girls are telling me – and it’s constant – that they cannot get in front of venture capitalists, that they cannot get in front of mentors, they cannot get in front of advisors, they just can’t even get in front of anyone to even put their idea up.”
“They seem to be relegated to sitting around at night with their mates, talking the ideas over with of a few beers. That’s not good enough.”
A word from the wise (not us) before you pitch – get your idea as solid as possible. In a recent AMA, Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founder of Atlassian, Australia’s biggest tech company, and who’s worth a casual $1.4 BILLION) said:
“Often (but not always – often) people complaining they “can’t raise money because of a lack of capital” are really saying they “can’t raise money because their idea or team are crap.”
Bruh.
