A day of triumph

As part of my entrepreneurship class, we take an idea, refine it and pitch it to Venture Capitalists for funding.

Our team picked my idea, but our team consisted of 4 "engineers" who had no idea about the business side of things and me. And our project was NOT moving forward and sometimes even regressing. As late as two weeks ago, we were in such bad shape that our advisor thought it needed divine intervention for us to complete this project to a reasonable level.
So I decided to take charge two weeks ago, emailed our professor to request for a chance to present in class, vastly raising the stakes in embarrassment and took over the creation of the powerpoint slide deck, which entailed refining our business model to extreme levels. I also paid a guy to do a mockup of our site. We worked Saturday from 1PM to 1AM, with me pushing to get it done and I worked on the slide deck sunday night, took ownership of presenting the first part of explaining the business which the most crucial role since this sets the tone for the entire presentation and practiced the heck out of it, in the shower, in front of a mirror, in front IS, to a level where I was comfortable, scripted up what the rest of the team should say, got them to practice and delivered it tonight.

It was a spectacular success and the rest of the advisors who were hearing from our advisor on how bad we were, just sat there, simply stunned. Of course they had lot of feedback, but overall were quite impressed.

In fact, a guest in our class, the CEO of a Venture Capital firm( who was employee number 5-6 in Oracle ) pulled me aside after the class and told me, and I quote, " You have great leadership potential and you can go places". He complimented me on my presentation style, and again I quote "a relaxed, unassuming manner that hides a lot of knowledge", and a "great presence" ( which was funny, considering I am under 5 feet :-) and told my professor "This is a very talented young lady". Apparently he was quite impressed with how I was not intimidated during the private feedback session he and another VC guest gave our team and how I was able to calmly respond.

It was a great feeling that made all the effort in the last week totally worth it. Amma and Nanna know how I was so disgusted with our performance two weeks ago but today I am on Cloud Nine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!