The air was thick with tension as five teams of Ivy League student entrepreneurs awaited the results of the finals at the DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge Monday afternoon at Columbia Business School in New York--it's a good thing Tim Draper brought his singing voice. Draper, founder and managing director of venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and the afternoon's most visible VC, cut through that tension with a rendition of his original tune "The Riskmaster" about the blood, sweat and tears life of an entrepreneur. He wrote the lyrics and the music came from an unnamed but well-known rock star, he said. As he played a little air guitar and acted out the words, the crowd relaxed and braced to see two Princeton PhD's take home the top prize, $350,000 in seed funding and a year of free office space for their implantable and permanently antimicrobial coating for medical devices, and one Columbia student take home a surprise second place award of $100,000 for his biodegradable, disposable dishware. So impressed by the business plans of the 12 companies that came out this year, the third New Venture Challenge DFJ has hosted, but the first outside of California, Draper said they might fund five of the companies. —Carolyn Murphy
Tim Draper jams "The Riskmaster" at the DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge May 21 at Columbia Business School
By Edward Schneidman, Michael Blair and David Malinger, Mayer Brown
Real estate sponsors that might wish to undertake an IPO will need to consider a wide variety of issues and begin to take action long before the first filing with the SEC.
Paulson's proposal to purchase an equity stake in Yellow Pages publisher Idearc is the second time in recent months an investor group has used its prepetition debt position to execute a bargain price 'exit LBO.'
