2009 Headlines
Johnson School Captures DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge Two Years Running
Keith Cowing's Digiceipt provides free online tracking of receipts
July 27, 2009 | Ithaca, NY | Johnson School MBA student Keith Cowing (MBA '10) won the 3rd Annual DFJ $250,000 East Coast Venture Challenge (ECVC) following up a first place win by Johnson School alumnus Jon Greene (MBA '04) for Widetronix last year and a top five performance by Brad Treat's Mezmeriz (MBA '02) in 2007. Cowing's business Digiceipt provides a free way for consumers to manage and track all their receipts online.
The ECVC competition consisted of two rounds, an online voting process hosted at ecvc.studentbusinesses.com and the final event including two rounds of pitching and Q&A. The competition offers aspiring student entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capital judges from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) in Menlo Park and DFJ Gotham in New York City and to receive seed funding and professional feedback. The winner is also entered into the DFJ-Cisco Global Business Plan Competition, where they will compete for an additional prize of at least $250,000.
Cowing, who earned a BS in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell in 2004, competed against student entrepreneurs from leading universities along the East coast including Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Yale. He worked alongside Aaron Nathan on the competition. Nathan also has two Cornell degrees to his name, a BS in electrical and computer engineering (2006) and Master's in computer science (2009).
Digiceipt is an online solution to manage and track receipts. The idea was hatched before Cowing entered the Johnson School and he spent most of his first year developing the business plan and building a team of 14 computer science students from Cornell's College of Engineering who built the prototype for course credit with Professor William Arms.
Cowing utilized several Cornell entrepreneurs to help him perfect the pitch that landed him first prize. Along with taking Professor David BenDaniel's Entrepreneurship and Private Equity class, he worked with Zach Shulman, the J. Thomas Clark Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise, and John Jaquette, the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship@Cornell, as well as Cornell alumni to perfect his pitch. He offered his tips on how he won the competition in an online blog for the Business Insider where he suggests entrepreneurs should focus on finding a problem and building a solution rather than just developing a product.
