Judges of USC's annual entrepreneurial competition Proving Ground have narrowed the business plans of over 50 entrants down to each category's top two finalists.
As the competition wrapped up on Thursday, those undergraduate and graduate student finalists took their last shot at proving their innovation abilities.
"We're looking for ideas that will change the world, and change the way people live," USC Proving Ground's website said.
Students brainstormed their ideas, built on them and made it to the finals of different categories that signified their meeting of that change-the-world criteria. Those categories are Maxient Innovation, Avenir Discovery and the Fan Favorite.
Behind the award-winning business models and technologies that enter the competition are aspiring entrepreneurs who call USC home.
James "Jeb" Roberts, a third-year political science and business student, and Ryan Barkley, a fourth-year economics student, kicked off "Hauled": a technological company with an app that connects customers to pick-up truck owners who will remove unwanted, large items from their homes.
Barkley and Roberts went to high school together in Charlotte. Barkley went on to Coastal Carolina University while Roberts attended the University of Mississippi. Both ended up transferring to South Carolina.
"We actually worked on a class project together," Barkley said. "And then we started talking about business ideas."
The team, finalists for the $17,500 Maxient Innovation prize, came up with the junk removal business idea after having worked both with software and in sales. Barkley said that while playing football at CCU, he took business advice from the coach.
Roberts said the two brainstormed the "Hauled" idea a year ago, and he sold his car to buy a pick-up truck. He and Barkley then did the heavy lifting for their business, even working over school breaks.
"The thing that we really got caught up in was the idea of doing every job ... like a small business setting," Roberts said.
They started with fliers in mailboxes and word-of-mouth, with a little help from social media. The two then built on their experience with Ebay.
"Instead of you [calling] a company to have your garage cleaned out or have a couch removed from your house," Roberts said, "what if you went online and listed that item, and then a bunch of people like us with pick-up trucks ... competed for that and just bid it down?"
Barkley and Roberts seek to tackle the problem of limited inexpensive options for people to get rid of junk in their homes as well as the problem of perfectly good items being left in landfills.
Another finalist, graduate student Rob Castellanos, was a contender for the $17,500 Avenir Discovery prize for his company, Syndiyo.
Syndiyo, which Castellanos said is Greek for "connection, or to connect," is a platform that allows medical patients and their families to consolidate their medical records, keep up with research on their medical conditions and participate in studies.
"If your mom, for example, has ... arthritis, your dad has diabetes and you have cystic fibrosis, which hopefully you don't," Castellanos said. "She could request all your records from all the doctors you've seen, you could organize them, consolidate them, etc., and you would have your conditions listed."
Castellanos grew up in Latin America, the U.S. and Europe, and graduated from USC last year with an international business and marketing degree. He worked at Google and is now pursuing the growth and development of Syndiyo.
The USC Proving Ground Entrepreneurial Challenge came to a close on Thursday night with the final round of presentations. Six teams competed for over $52,000 in seed money by presenting their business ideas to judges in a "Shark Tank"-type format.
However, Jonathan Peterson, a co-founder of Tux on Trux, a mobile tuxedo rental service, and a competitor in the 2015 Proving Ground competition, encouraged students to pursue entrepreneurship as their passion, not for the money.
“Get into entrepreneurship because you love the hustle and the spirit behind it, not because you want to make money.”
The competition was split into three categories for the 2016 competition: the Avenir Discovery category, the Maxient Innovation category and SCRA Fan Favorite. The teams contained current graduate students, undergraduate students and recent alumni of the university.
Roberts and Barkley of "Hauled" were the winners of the Maxient Innovation Category, and they said that the process of competing in The Proving Ground helped them develop their business and receive money needed to move forward.
“This is what an entrepreneurial student wants and needs. Everybody has ideas; not everybody has the capital to bring it to fruition,” said Barkley.
Roberts also said that the competition serves as a guide to show students the opportunities that are available to them, even amongst the busyness that surrounds a college student’s life.
“This is the school’s way of saying, ‘Yes you can, you can be entrepreneurs and in college at the same time.’”
Other successful former competitors were in attendance at Tuesday night’s presentation. Ian Mackintosh, winner of the 2015 Avenir Discovery Award and founder of Brevino, a table top bottle cooler company, spoke on the way that successful competitors analyze and use their business plan throughout the competition.
“The business plan that they develop early on helps them and forces them to think about different problems and challenges they’re going to have.”
The judges for the competition included Candice and Aaron Hank, founders of Maxient, Darrin Thomas, president of the Thomas Media Group and Amborose Schwallie, SCRA Director of Corporate Development.