Twelve teams to compete in business plan finals
Leaf Pile Media: Andrew Zimmerman, Walter
Barber, and Ian VanNest.
Three former Skidmore College roommates who won $20,000 in last year's Kenneth A. Freirich Business Plan Competition with a plan to turn their "original fictional universe" into a profitable board game took a major step toward their goal Monday with the launch of a 30-day $15,000 Kickstarter campaign.
Just four days into that drive, Leaf Pile Media — founded by Walter Barber '14, Ian VanNest '14, and Andrew Zimmermann '14 — already has passed the halfway mark. If they raise the full $15,000, they'll be able to produce the first 300 sets of "Champions of Hara," a game in which players living in a world of chaos must contain three primal sources of energy that are "raging out of control and threatening to tear the world apart," the founders say.
Leaf Pile Media's success and that of other Freirich-launched businesses will be celebrated this Friday afternoon, April 10, as Skidmore's entrepreneurial community gathers for the competition's fifth anniversary. Presentations by eight student teams in the for-profit and artistic category — which carries a top prize of $20,000 and second- and third-place prizes of $10,000 and $5,000 — will start at 3:30 p.m. in Filene Recital Hall. Presentations in the social entrepreneurship category will precede them at 1:30 p.m.
Will the winner be Adirondack Flannel with its "Saratoga Shirt" -- a dress shirt that combines the classic style of an Oxford shirt with the comfort of flannel? MyCity Brewing and its Buffalo-brewed beer? A next-generation composting service? Or the novel that twin sisters are writing about their great-great-grandmother's emigration from Russia to Turkey after the Bolshevik Revolution?
Total cash prizes and in-kind legal and accounting services will top $60,000.
All of the teams have been sharpening their presentations with help from alumni mentors who served as judges in the first round of the competition on February 27.
“We have never seen a larger or stronger field of contestants," noted Roy Rotheim, professor of economics and director of the competition. “All of these initiatives are quintessentially Skidmore in their creativity, global reach, and social consciousness.”
“The businesses and organizations are as diverse as ever, and I am always amazed by the incredible amount of talent and creativity among the students," Freirich added.
