Dempsey Startup Competition — Sweet 16

Prize

🏆 Sweet 16 — Dempsey Startup Competition, University of Washington (2023)

The Dempsey Startup Competition is run by the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, and is open to student teams from across the region.

Teams pitch to panels of practising investors and entrepreneurs, and the field is cut round by round — from the opening trade show down to the Sweet 16, then the Final Four.

Our team took the breast cancer screening device forward into the competition and advanced to the Sweet 16.

It was the same venture that went on to win Best Idea for a Medical Device and the Spark Award at the Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge that year, and the Dempsey rounds were where a lot of the business case got stress-tested by people who had actually built companies.

What I took away from it was less about the placing and more about the questioning. Engineers get good at defending a design. Standing in front of investors teaches you to defend a market.