Submissions There is no fee to submit a pitch and no Princeton affiliation is required. You are allowed to submit more than one plan, but each plan must conform to these rules and be a separate and distinct business concept. A business which has previously entered our contest in a prior year may not re-enter the same business. In addition any business which has secured $75,000 or more in total funding including prize money prior to the entry deadline shall not be eligible. We understand that all new businesses are at different levels of maturity. We currently do not have a formal format for the entry requirements and welcome submissions of those documents that best describe the business. Previous finalist submissions have ranged from short text based executive summaries, to PowerPoint presentations to multipage plans with detailed diagrams. Excessively long business plans are discouraged, however we will review them all and score them relative to other entries. A screening committee will review all the submissions and select three finalists to present at the event. The screening committee decision shall be final. All submissions must clearly explain the business concept in terms that do not expect the reader to be an expert in your industry or technology. The screening committee will not ask questions of submitters and each submission must stand on its own merits. In addition each plan should have at least some information describing the founder(s) and the business economics.
Questions may be emailed to
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. Submissions and only submissions should be sent to
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by February 14, 2010. Late entries may be rejected for any or no reason regardless of the cause of the delay even if due to a PEN email issue. All submitters will be notified of their status no later than March 2, 2010 by email. Non-finalists are welcome to attend the contest event, but must register as usual. Finalists will have the registration fee for two presenters waived additional team members may attend, but must register as usual. Finalist Presentations Finalists will present at the March 16, 2010 event. Presentations will be done in a randomly selected order. Each presenter will have 10 minutes to present. There will be 5 minutes of Q&A time from the judges and audience. Presenters may bring a PowerPoint or PDF file on a USB flash drive to project from a PC (not Mac) during their presentation. Do not send any such presentation with your submission. Finalists must present in person. Confidentiality Note that any materials that you submit to PEN will be shared with a limited set of screeners who will review the materials in order to select the finalists. While these individuals are asked to keep materials confidential and PEN does not intend to share your materials beyond those individuals, PEN cannot guarantee the confidentiality of any materials that you provide. All material transmission is done by email, which is not guaranteed to be secure. In addition the selected finalists are required to present their business plan at a meeting where the contest winner is selected. That meeting is open to all PEN members and their guests.
