The past few weeks have been an eventful time for PK Clean, with our
team competing in our first two business plan competitions, and
already winning 4 awards. Although I have been involved with PK Clean
for over two years now, I was initially reluctant to enter these
competitions as I feared it would distract from our main operational
goals of fully testing the technology and building our pilot plant. In
hindsight, I am glad we focused on the technical and operational
aspects first, because without a functioning pilot plant our pitches
would have less substance and be mere speculation.
Business plan competitions are not simply about the prize money
(although non-dilutive funding always helps!) but offer many
advantages: networking with mentors and judges, finding passionate
teammates, challenging your business model assumptions, practicing
your investor pitch and giving your business and team momentum. The PK
Clean team is vast at this point - it is not only the efforts of our
MIT student team, but our extremely supportive mentors and advisors,
our dedicated team on the ground in India and years of hard work from
our original inventor, Percy Kean. Being an entrepreneur is filled
with endless ups and downs, and simple wins at a business plan
competition can help encourage everyone on the team to keep working
hard despite the inevitable setbacks.
In addition to dedicating these wins to my immensely supportive
family, our extremely hard working India team and Percy Kean, I would
like to acknowledge the help and inputs of many advisors and
classmates to our team: Avi Goldberg (co-Founder Great Point Energy),
Bill Davis (co-Founder Ze-Gen), Bill Aulet (MIT Entrepreneurship
Center Director), Tod Hynes (co-Founder XL Hybrids), Vanessa Green
(OnChip Power), Ani Vallabhaneni (Sanergy), Kiran Divvela (MIT), Avi
Yaar (TechStars), Alex Loijos (LinkCycle), Prithvi Reddy (MIT), Sudeep
Tandon (MIT), my marvelous Comm Professor Virginia Healey-Tangney,
among many many others have sacrificed their time to offer their help
and expertise. The pictures below are some of Arjun and I presenting
PK Clean at Rice (Rice hosts the largest Business Plan competition in
the world, with > 500 entrants globally and a max of 2 entries allowed
per school - they fortunately made an exception and allowed 3 from MIT
this year). PK Clean won Best Energy Plan and came in 3rd across all
categories - we will be featured in Fortune on May 9, so lookout for
more updates from our team. PK Clean thanks you for your support in
helping bring our technology to market!