A $2,500 paycheck isn’t bad for 60 seconds of work.
Jessica Laviolette, a 2006 Brandon High School graduate and sophomore psychology major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the recipient of that check when she won the grand prize in the first annual MIT elevator pitch contest in October.
Laviolette says the point of an elevator pitch is that an entrepreneur has only 60 seconds between the first floor and the floor a company executive or an investor gets off at to convince the executive/investor that they need to have a follow-up meeting with you to discuss your idea.
MIT sponsored the contest to foster interest and talent and there were several categories for contestants to compete in, with the grand prize of $2,500. The final round was meant to simulate an actual elevator pitch.
Laviolette was seated in the auditorium with the other competitors, from schools including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale, when she and another finalist were called to give their pitches on the spot, without any advance notice they were the finalists.
She stood and gave her pitch, as follows:
‘Imagine your dream sports car. The engine makes it fast, the interior makes it comfortable, but the paint, now that’s what makes it beautiful. It’s also what makes it so expensive to produce. Painting and drying a car is the most expensive and time consuming portion of the automobile manufacturing process. It takes about 2 hours and a $200 million clean room to simply dry the paint on a car. With my company’s patent pending technology, we’re making beauty more affordable. We’ve reduced that 2 hour drying to less than 15 minutes, and that initial capital investment of $200 million is slashed to less than $10 million. My name is Jessica Laviolette and I’d be more than happy to talk with you after the competition.?
After she won, she and her teammate and business partner, Paul Nikandrou, had plenty of people to talk to.
‘Paul and I were very excited when we won,? Laviolette said. ‘It was almost overwhelming because we had many people trying to congratulate us while we had venture capitalists and angel investors trying to set up meetings with us at the same time.?
Laviolette is no stranger to winning.
She won first place in engineering in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2006, for her project, ‘Optimizing Ethanol Production Efficiency,? earning a $3,000 cash prize, as well as a $1,000 prize for BHS. She also won a vacuum science award, taking a $500 cash prize at the fair.
This year, Laviolette has been working on her patent-pending process, in which she uses vacuum science and a selectively permeable membrane to make ethanol production 100-percent efficient. She has improved the process further from 2005, when she took the grand prize and seven other first-place prizes at the Science and Engineering Fair of Metropolitan Detroit with her project, ‘Rapid Production of Ethanol by Vacuum Process.?
Laviolette repeated as grand-prize winner in 2006 at the Detroit fair, and won another six first-place prizes, including the Weizmann Award, given to the top high school senior at the fair. As the winner of this award, she studied at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel the summer after graduation.
She and Nikandrou, a Fulbright Scholar from Cyprus, along with some venture capitalists, are working with Delta T to get their first plant constructed. They are also applying for several grants totaling more than $1 million to help fund their business and working out a licensing agreement with a California-based ethanol plant to use her ethanol-related patent.