I got home well after midnight on Friday, after a long and brutal day of meetings in NYC. And, I am still dragging my left leg around after a spiral tib/fib fracture in February.  Then, I judged the super-Saturday HBS business plan competition starting at 8:00 am on Saturday. This is the round that goes from about 80 plans to 10 plans. I am not sure, but I think I have been doing the super-Saturday judging since the inception of the competition 14 years ago.

Each year it is the same format with the same winnowing. Each year it is also different. Fashions have changed over the last 14 years. I only see five teams out of the 80 or so that entered the competition, but talking to the other judges over lunch, there does seem to be a consistency to the plans this year (and last year as well). 

For confidentiality reasons I can’t discuss the actual business plans. But, unlike plans from the dot com era, plans this year (and last year) were doable in scope, modest in capital needs and ambitious in their goals. Not a single one of the five plans I judged was looking to raise more than $1 million. Furthermore, of the five plans three were actually in process, in the sense that students were actually executing on them. Of the five plans none seemed to me patently unrealistic, although I suspect that two would not work (one for technology reasons and the other because the business model simply wont work). This year, and last year, have been great – actual entrepreneurs who will create businesses that will improve our lives and employ people.

In 1999 the competition was the same, but the plans were from a different conceptual universe. If my memory serves me well, students were looking for big bucks and were going to change the world. It is not at all clear to me that they did.  I had to leave lunch before hearing Mike Robert’s annual speech about how many plans have been funded and how much exit value has been realized etc.   

I wonder if Prof. Roberts should not start analyzing the competition in terms of eras and start looking at the values produced in the bubble compared to the values produced in eras of more modest expectations.

Having said all this, HBS has, over the years, consistently produced crop after crop of impressive students with impressive ideas and impressive skills. If I came in from out of town at 6:00 a.m. with two broken legs, I would still show up for Super Saturday.