Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Hump Day Drinking - Every Wednesday 9pm!!!

Wikipedia definition of Hump Day:
An English language idiom for Wednesday is "hump day", a reference to making it through to the middle of the work week as getting "over the hump."

Event: Hump Night at Unibar! (AKA Wednesday Night Drinking)
Where: Unibar
When: Every Wednesday night starting at 9pm
Who: Everyone
Why: Last few weeks before people go out on internships and exchange

Zeopane on CNN Money

I am proud of being a part of the Zeopane Team. It now featured on CNN Money Website as part of the list of teams that participated in the RICE University Business Plan Competition.

Another feather in the cap.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Down the home stretch

This week marks the beginning of the end, the last semester that many of us in the 16 month program will be here in HK taking classes with one another. It really does go by fast, and it is hard to believe that while most will not graduate until January, being on exchange in fall and working over the summer limits our dedicated time to the program to 9+ months.

Although my load is particularly light this semester, the projects that are running in tandem keep me quite busy. Time is now split between class (1/3), Field study and Business plan work(1/3) and job/internship searching(1/3). While there is a lot of nervousness in the air for the ones who have not yet secured an internship, there is hope. The recent rate of offerings has been increasing, and it seems like every day another one of our classmates has the opportunity to say that they landed a most amazing internship opportunity.

Stay tuned, as my team will be participating in the HKUST International Business Plan this upcoming week and the competition sounds exciting!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Zeopane - Challenge Round Winners @RICE

Zeopane and I finally has something to show for the marathon 3 month effort that really all started in the second week of January. Even though we'd identified the product in early December, we didn't get down to beginning work on it till after the Winter break.

The next two months were really an experience to be remembered. Lost all contact with the rest of the world for a few days in between. Just managed to get by assignments, exams, classes and finally ventured out for my 4 week sojourn in the U.S that started on March 11th.

Carnegie Mellon University's McGinnis Ventures was truly an eye-opener on what some of these competitions can be. The competition far exceeded our expectations. Ventures with funding, sales orders, all due-diligence complete and some even already functioning. How were we - this fictional company with no US-Experience, no-Pharma Industry experience and no funding of any sort (even my CMU Ticket was self-funded :-)) expected to compete. We got hammered and did not even make the finals. Got some feedback which read - FDA Comments Naive!!!

We at Zeopane decided to turn the tables around, did our due-diligence on FDA in US in terms of how expensive it can be, SFDA in China and turned the story around to a China Story. This clearly was a great strategy. Even if we weren't the Pharma experts, we now clearly were the China Experts with 3 Chinese looking people on the team. With me, the Technology and Diabetes expert on the team, we were almost a complete team.

At Rice, we got some great comments. Some people rated us the best presentation among all the teams they saw. We had quite a few people convinced that Zeopane microneedles was truly a great product. We had one China based VC expressing an interest in talking further with us. Another India Fund wanted to know if I wanted to explore entering the India market with this product. Need to follow up with these two and all the other contacts we've made at Rice in between catching up with all the classes and exams I missed during my 1 month vacation in US.

Overall, by the end of the Rice Competition, HKUST and Zeopane had made its impact. The most unforgettable moment was when a couple of guys (not from HKUST) went up to the Karaoke Stage and started screaming "Zeopane, Zeopane". :-)