Auburn, Ala. (EETV) - Zac Young joined Auburn University's entrepreneurship program last fall and walked away with thousands of dollars for his start-up company along with a valuable skillset for pitching his ideas.
Young worked his way from the ground up - starting out with no previous knowledge of how to pitch at all. Within six months of entering the entrepreneurship program, he had won the 2020 SECU Student Business Pitch Competition and the Auburn Harbert College of Business' Halloween Pitch Competition. Just the other day on March 26, he won Auburn's Seventh Annual Tiger Cage, Auburns premier student pitch competition, with the Wave Timer, a handheld device used by utility companies to measure statistics in power lines.
"Winning the Tiger Cage has been such a blessing." Zac Young said. He earned $25,000 in startup capital from the competition.
The Tiger Cage is presented by the Harbert College of Business, and four teams are given 10 minutes to pitch their ideas over zoom to 14 industry professional judges. After thorough questioning and testing of the idea, a winner is chosen.
What set Young apart from the other teams?
Olivia Cook, policy research analyst for the Alabama Commission of Higher Education and pitch coach, said, "I felt like he really knew his market. He knew how to go about demonstrating the product. He showed a video throwing the Wave Timer up in the air, it falling down and not be broken. That was one of my main concerns. How was it resistant? What did the wear and tear look like? And he pinpointed all of those little concerns I had.”
Cook believes the competition will continue to grow and that she looks forward to the innovation that students will come up with every year.
