women 2.0 pitch finals - and the winners

Last night's Women 2.0 pitch finals attracted an overflow crowd of entrepreneurs, investors, and curious watchers including Justin.tv. It was a remarkably diverse crowd; at least half the presenters were born outside the U.S. and the teams had to be at least half female and under 35.

You couldn't help but be awed by the qualifications of the finalists: Stanford, MIT, Wellesley, Google, Microsoft, Sandisk, Marshall scholars, 24 patents--and that was just the three women from FindYourScene.com.

I was sitting with two engineers, and all of us were surprised at how business-y the crowd was for a tech gathering. I didn't even see anyone else in the audience with a laptop. It reflects Women 2.0's roots, as a spinoff a year ago from Entrepreneur 27, and the omni-presence of Stanford business school and the Silicon Valley investment community.
Flickr pics by itselea

The five teams had been winnowed down from twenty five semi-finalists (including me), and were competing for cash prizes and two private pitch sessions with Tim Draper and Michael Moritz.

• FindYourScene is a social network targeted at young urban singles; Upcoming meets Dodgeball with a little Facebook integration thrown in for good measure.
  
  It sounded fun, if hard to achieve critical mass outside urban areas where there's a lot of competition. Like all the products pitched, FindYourScene is a smart idea, one most of us could envision using (or at least trying out).
  
  
• Laser-Seal is a patented technique for using short-wave lasers to heal wounds.
  
  I was particularly interested in this because my uncle Jim's team at IBM invented the laser surgery technique that Lasik and many other medical innovations is based on. The Laser-Seal team was filled with young but multi-talented individuals: practicing doctors and scientists pursuing Stanford MBAs.
  
  They face a lot of challenges in bringing a product like this to market, first with FDA trials to ensure it works without burning or scarring and then licensing the technique and evangelizing a new medical practice. A woman in hallway said she'd tell Laser-Seal to focus on plastic surgery and set up shop in Brazil :)
  
  
• O'light uses state of the art OLED (organic light emitting device) to manufacture flexible, transparent, colored products. Yiru Sun of Princeton has been researching OLED for years, and while Sony and Samsung are likely to produce OLED displays in the near future, O'light intends to focus initially on high-end furnishings, where aesthetics are more important than clarity.
  
  This was the weakest set of slides, although virtually all of the teams could have used a graphic designer. But high-end lighting is a visual sell, and I wanted to see pictures of what you could do with transparent, flexible, thin lights. As it turned out, O'light had a few photos, but didn't show them, focusing on bullets and bullets of projections. When asked who their next few hires would be, they said engineers and scientists. My tip to O'light: get a designer onboard now and let them go wild building gorgeous, inventive prototypes and show what this technology can really do.
  
  
• QT Star intends to be the YouTube of China. Or maybe a more commercially successful Revver. Of all the product ideas presented, this struck me as the largest business opportunity, wrapping video content in tags and providing a revenue split for creator and site.
  
  I found it a bit naive, to talk about user-created content in China without anyone raising issues of censorship or political repercussions for those making and posting videos. (None of the judges even asked about this). And the QT Star team claimed they would capture 2/3 of the market in three years; well, it's good to be an optimist. I do think someone, maybe several someones, will get very rich in this space.
  
  
• (You)StyleMe is a social shopping website, allowing users to create a digital closet and upload images of their current clothes as well as body style and then receive comments.
  
  This was the best presentation, even though it was at the end of a long night. Amina's a very good speaker, the slides had pictures, and the backgrounds of the founders in Gap retail and Yahoo community development gave me confidence in their ability to make the right partnerships and execute. Even though I've never liked shopping with my mother, and I'd never buy shoes online. I suspect they haven't quite hit the sweet spot in functionality yet, but I'm sure we'll hear more once they refine the feature set. There's money to be made in a more personalized e-commerce experience.
  

As the judges made their selections, the audience text-messaged our votes. To my surprise, the crowd vote was identical to the judges.

O'light won the audience award with 28% of votes, followed closely by Laser-Seal. I voted for O'light, as I learned afterward did the people I was sitting with. Sometimes an idea captures people's imaginations, and both Laser-Seal and O'light boiled down to something novel but simple. Fix wounds fast, without scarring. Bend colored light. Notably, neither was software.

On the downside, we lost half an hour to technical difficulties (at Macromedia, we used to say the definition of multimedia is anything that makes your presentation start 15 minutes late).

And the format favored the teams presenting to investors in the front row rather than taking questions from the 200 members of the audience. I would have preferred bringing the lights up so we could see the presenters rather than their slides, and be able to tell which of the VCs was asking the questions.

But that's quibbling. The content was great, and the excitement in the room was palpable. And Silicon Valley proves itself again as a center for innovation, fueled in no small part by incredibly smart, ambitious women (and men) who come here from all over the world.

As one of the judges--Carol Sands perhaps--admonished the crowd, "I’d like to see things that change the world." Big ideas, ones you can not only live with for 5 to 10 years while bringing your product to market, but ones that take on the must fix problems of the world around us.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with all of these companies, as I move forward with my own mobile product, which I would never have fleshed out if not for having a deadline and this competition.

Many thanks to Shaherose, Shivani, Angie, and Wen-Wen for producing a great event and bringing all the people and pieces together. And for the cupcakes.