MIT Start-up Showcase
Shortbord extends our heartfelt thanks to the committee that selected us to present at the MIT Start-up Showcase on December 3. It was a great honor, and we had a blast speaking with so many smart grad students, industry execs, and venture capitalists. The feedback we received was terrific, and we’re glad that so many talented and experienced people believe that we are on to something big.
An even bigger honor than being selected from a pool of several hundred applicants to present at the Showcase was receiving enough votes from the crowd to be 1 of 3 companies selected to “pitch” the entire MIT VC conference yesterday. We were given the chance to explain the business rationale behind Shortbord to an audience of investors and technologists – an intimidating forum for our first public appearance!
Our talk centered around aligning the incentives of the three members of the online advertising ecosystem – individuals, websites, and advertisers – to solve the two fundamental problems that the market faces: 1) advertisers are unable to “connect” with individuals when they are having a conversation on social websites, and 2) websites are unable to monetize despite massive amounts of users. It seemed that people hearing our pitch at the conference yesterday understood that a systematic word-of-mouth advertising system would enable individuals to promote their favorite brands to friends, family and followers, thereby enabling advertisers to connect with individuals on a personal level and social websites to generate revenues from advertising. The conversations we had with conference attendants after our pitch were very thoughtful, and we loved the enthusiasm about Shortbord’s value proposition to individuals. We suspected it would be the case, and now we can say it with a high degree of confidence: people like getting paid for what they are already doing anyways.
Overall, the past two days at MIT were great fun and we look forward to continuing discussions with many of the people we met. Thanks for voting for us, happy surfing.
