The Startup Showcase

The Startup Showcase Uni-Five Podcast For a long time, I pondered over how we could best help entrepreneurs, particularly entrepreneurs in the African American community. Given the landscape in which we are all aware, a bevy of talent, skills, ideas, energy, and intelligence but a lack institutional springboards, especially in the realm of entrepreneurship. I think I'm on to something. A new system, a way to support and empower entrepreneurs. I call it Uni-Five a Startup Community it's a platform for organizing Startup Showcases which are very similar to pitch competitions. However, showcases extend well beyond a normal pitch competition and everyone in a showcase can potentially walk away a winner even the host. Showcases are just that they showcase entrepreneurs and their unique business story and the problem their business solves in the world. These pitches (presentations) are made by entrepreneurs captured in video in front of a live audience. The idea is to...

A pitch is an oral and visual presentation of your business.  Blog

Every business needs a good name and a great public image. After all, business is about establishing a relationship with your target market. Like any relationship, it takes time for people to begin to know you and to trust you and to buy products from you. For small businesses, we are competing against mega companies with vast resources who have carefully molded their public image for years. However, as a small company we have a unique advantage, we can develop intimate relationships with our target market. We can cater our services and products around what consumers really want. We can help our community develop and grow in a way mega companies could only dream of. What I'm I talking about? I'm talking about Sponsorship!  Sponsorship is a great way to endear yourself to your community and to bring attention to who you are and what you have to offer. Sometimes marketing can become redundant, and people get tired of our messaging and let's face it talking about your prod...

It's often said that an entrepreneur will work 80 hours a week so they won't have to work 40 hours for someone else. Time is very important to entrepreneurs, that's why the organizations that engage them should adopt a clear strategy to ensure that their not wasting their time. There are t hree keys to successful entrepreneurial engagement that organizations need to adopt, inform, engage and empower. Inform: This is where you want to be intimate and intelligent. Get close to your entrepreneurs, talk to them. Uncover what they are struggling with and what information you can impart to help them. B e sure to utilize your Pitch network page for webinars/google hangouts and live chats  within your pitch network window. Use the about section to post links and videos to create a reservoir of information for your community.  Make it a practice to allow entrepreneurs to have a say in your programming.  Engage: This is where you let your dynamic community you organized...

What does it mean to be service oriented and what does that have to do with cultivating a community? Our lives are filled with a constant stream of dualities, and moral dilemmas that help to shape our point of view. We experience  good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, truth and falsehood and communities and the non-community. This where our experiences of community dangerously leads us into a failed social arrangement that marginalizes differences and servers diversity in people and in thinking. More importantly, it assumes that because of commonality that community exist. Commonality is a static view of "community", predicated on similarities we have with other people. Which mistakenly leads us on a path of assumption which can dangerously lead to disharmony, obstruction and loss. Acknowledging similarities among people is a great way to begin to form healthy relations, but there is another dynamic at play when it comes to community. Community like ot...

We spent two years researching the most progressive practices in entrepreneurial engagement. What we discovered was a trend, a pattern, a set of best practices the finest institutions used to accelerate entrepreneurial success. This revelation, helped us develop an application designed to help organize highly engaging and interactive pitch competitions. In the book, Traction author Gabriel Weinberg wrote, "Community building is the process of i nvesting in the connections among your users, fostering those relationships and helping them bring more people into your circle." Successful companies and organizations we surveyed not only invested time and resources in entrepreneurs but played particular attention to the environment and the engagement process, building not just entrepreneurial programs but entrepreneurial communities. One great entrepreneurial engagement activity and a surprisingly highly effective community building strategy is a pitch competit...