Annual Elevator Pitch Competition Awards Website

Conor White-Sullivan, a former student at UMass Amherst, won $500 yesterday from the fourth annual Elevator Pitch Competition for his website, localocracy.org, which provides a platform for registered voters to voice their opinions on town issues.

The event, sponsored by the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum, Harvard Student Agencies, and the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, gave the 24 participants only 90 seconds to present their ideas to a panel. According to the organizers, this event tested a key skill in the business world: pitching ideas to an executive in the time of an elevator ride.

The panel included Bilal Zubari, who works for General Catalyst Partners, a Boston investment company, Woodward Yang, an electrical engineering and computer science professor, and Brent J. Hurley, YouTube founding member. They judged the participants based on the quality of the idea and delivery of the pitch itself.

Dan G. Sullivan ’11, co-president of the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum who moderated the event, said the purpose of the Elevator Pitch was to spread awareness of entrepreneurship opportunities. The Technology and Entrepreneurship Center funded the $1,000 in prize money.

Zubari said that, from an outside perspective, Harvard’s community seems disjointed: undergraduates and graduate students rarely collaborate on similar ideas. However, he said the situation is improving. “What Harvard is doing now,” Zubari said, “is more of a coordinated effort to bring people together to talk about innovation.”

This event is also a precursor to i3, the larger competition in March that awards a total of $50,000 to social or commercial startup companies, according to Alexander R. Gerson ’12, Harvard Student Agencies Director of the i3 Harvard Innovation Challenge.

“Especially at a place like Harvard,” Gerson said, “everyone has an idea. If we could just capitalize on that and incentivize people to pitch those ideas...there are some amazing ideas.”

Many of the startups yesterday involved social media, either for campus life, college counseling, or global health. The other finalists included an anti-corrosive agent, a texting service to remind mothers of critical pregnancy checkups in India, an aggregated news site for Hispanic Americans, and a digital pet for mobile devices.

While the event was geared toward undergraduates, Sullivan said pitching was open to anyone. It attracted an audience of over 60 people and ideas from all over campus, but in the end, the winner was unaffiliated with the university.

White-Sullivan said he originally came to campus with his friend Samuel B. Novey ’11 to recruit future employees from Harvard, but ended up pitching his company at the last minute. “Harvard has been very good to me this weekend,” he said.