Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we’ll be featuring the winners of the first Big50-2018 Startup Challenge.
Here’s how the first challenge worked. Startups selected one of 4 tracks to compete in, with each track corresponding to various stages in the typical startup’s growth: Elevator Pitch, the Art of Disruption, Big Problems Lead to Big Opportunities, and Exit Strategies.
For instance, startups seeking VC funding are likely to choose the Elevator Pitch track.
After you choose your track, each startup is then on the hot seat, peppered with a series of questions about the topic of their choosing, questions that help the Startup50 team understand how well positioned these startups are to reach their goals.
Elevator pitch startups were asked about the market they target, the incumbents in it, the nature of the problem they hope to solve, why they think people will pay to solve it, etc.
For Challenge 1, we are selecting up to 12 winners, spread among the 4 categories. However, winners will not be spread out equally, but, rather, proportionally. (I.e., tracks with more competitors will have more winners.)
The most popular path chosen by Big50-2018 competitors was the Art of Disruption. The startups that choose the Disruption path are focusing on everything from the enterprise WAN market to IoT to storage.
Today, we kick off with our first winner, 128 Technology, a startup developing a “session-aware” router that competes against SD-WAN technology.
