Broadcast 2254 (Special Edition)

Guests: Tom Olson, Meagan Crawford. Topics: The 2014 Lightening Round Competition during the NewSpace 2014 Conference. Please direct all comments and questions regarding Space Show programs/guest(s) to the Space Show blog, http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com. Comments and questions should be relevant to the specific Space Show program. Written Transcripts of Space Show programs are a violation of our copyright and are not permitted without prior written consent, even if for your own use. We do not permit the commercial use of Space Show programs or any part thereof, nor do we permit editing, YouTube clips, or clips placed on other private channels & websites. Space Show programs can be quoted, but the quote must be cited or referenced using the proper citation format. Contact The Space Show for further information. In addition, please remember that your Amazon purchases can help support The Space Show/OGLF. See www.onegiantleapfoundation.org/amazon.htm. For those listening to archives using live365.com and rating the programs, please email me as to why you assign a specific rating to the show. This will help me bring better programming to the audience. We welcomed back both Tom Olson and Meagan Crawford to discuss the “Lightning Pitch” event in lieu of the customary Business Plan Competition to be held the first day of the NewSpace Conference 2014, July 24 in Silicon Valley. You can learn more about the NewSpace 2014 conference by visiting https://newspace.spacefrontier.org. To learn about the Lightening Pitch, go to http://newspacebpc.com/lightning-pitch-2014. In the first segment of our 90 minute show, Tom and Meagan described this year's Lightening Pitch, talked about the sponsors and the $20,000 in prize money, and they gave us hints of what the new and expanded business plan competition for 2015 will be like. We honed in on the approaching entry deadline which is 5PM EDT on Saturday, June 7. There are no entry fees and all one has to do is submit up to a 3 page Executive Summary for their business startup idea. The selected contestants will have four minutes to deliver their pitch the first day of the NewSpace Conference, then they will have a 3 minutes Question and Answer session where contestants will field provoking questions from the “Shark Tank” of Investor/Judges. The winners will be announced that evening at a special Lightening Round conference VIP event. Submit your entry using compete@newspacebpc.com. During this segment, Tom and Meagan took questions about the history and overall success of the business plan competition, trends in NewSpace, oversight issues, team size and issues, and questions about winning topics and how to make a killer presentation. In the second segment, we talked about space investments becoming routine and the possible timeline for this to happen. Our guests talked about nanotech & its influence on the entrepreneurial community. A listener asked our guests about competition bias and included space solar power projects (SSP) as an example. Another listener wanted to know if the competition was biased toward one person businesses. Here, our guests had much to say about teams, how to counter a one person plan, and why judges prefer seeing a team in place rather than just one person. Toward the end of the program, we talked about expected ROIs and exit strategy time lines for the winning plans, plus for the space industry in general. Both our guests summarized the Lightening Round by saying there was no entry fee, the deadline for a simple Executive Summary of no more than 3 pages is this Saturday, June 7, and they look forward to receiving your entry. Post comments/questions on The Space Show blog above. You can reach our guests by using compete@newspacebpc.com or businessplan@newspacebpc.com.