One of the competitions you WON’T see listed on our Competitions page of this website is Best Buy’s College Innovator’s Fund. I’m not even putting a link to it here in this blog post. Why? Well, i’ts because it looks as though they have what I call a “conflict of ethics.”
Check out this article in December’s Forbes: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/05/best-buy-startup-liable/. It’s a great story of a now defunct start-up whose investors went after Best Buy for stealing their idea, and WON in the courts.
This is really scary to me. How can such a well-known, successful, and even respected company be in such blatant violation of basic business ethics? And given such, why would I ever steer students to their competition? It’s simply mind-boggling to me.
Whatever you do, be sure that your employees, partners, and investors are credible, trustworthy and ethical, or else you will run into nothing but trouble down the road. I don’t care how easy the money might be — you will be better off (emotionally, if not financially) by staying away from entities with questionable ethics and tactics.
I would like to spread the word about the Rice Business Plan Competition as something to definitely check out: http://alliance.rice.edu/rbpc.aspx. I competed while in business school and the prize amounts were staggering (>$1.5MM). Also, any competition sponsored by Kleiner Perkins has to be taken seriously by any entrepreneur!
Oliver
http://lbandm.com/
LikeLike