Business plan competiton season is in full swing — the MIT 100K’s Elevator Pitch Competition, and the Executive Summary Contest is getting started. Researcher/entrepreneur/business plan competition judge Vivek Wadhwa weighs in at TechCrunch, suggesting that losing business plan competitions may be better for startups than winning. Wadhwa calls the competitions a relic of the dot-com era, and compares winners to children whose parents praise them too much.
A quick scan of past winners backs up Wadhwa’s argument — the winners haven’t gone on to become huge successes, while Akamai, Harmonix and Brontes all lost.
Meanwhile, investor/entrepreneur/business plan competition judge Sim Simeonov says he disagrees with Wadhwa but adds his own criticism, saying the competitions move the target from creating a successful business to winning the competiton, and force judges to decide a winner without any kind of VC-style due diligence.
So what does all that mean for Rouzbeh Shahsavari, who recently won five grand for his nano-engineered concrete startup? Who knows? Above, watch Shahsavari possibly doom his startup by winning, and the other contestants ensure wild success by losing the $100k Elevator Pitch Contest last month.
It was the latter last night, as the 
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