During the Spring of 2012, I was one of forty students that was selected to participate in the first ever 3 Day Startup event to be hosted at the University of Houston. 3 Day Startup gathers the forty most entrepreneurial minded students on-campus together to start tech companies over the course of three days. I had to apply for the program and go through an interview process. I was able to pitch my idea for Chromemote that I had been working on for several months prior to the event, and the interviewers really liked my idea. It wasn’t long before I was accepted to participate.
Almost everybody coming into the event had their own ideas to pitch, but we broke into teams and narrowed it down to just over ten ideas by the evening where we voted for the top five. I pitched my idea to everybody and after the vote count came out Chromemote made the top five. So then I was able to gather a team of developers and business minded people together to spend the rest of the weekend working on my idea. After telling everybody what I needed help with I had four people join my team. The Chromemote team, which was later renamed Mote consisted of developers Ankit Anchila, Eduardo Gerardo Mendizabal, business gurus Rad Elhage, Norris Kwan, and myself the wild-card.
Over the weekend my idea grew into a much larger and broader idea. Initially I was interested in building a highly customizable web-based Google TV remote application. After brainstorming the larger idea of Mote emerged, which is a startup dedicated to creating a universal smart tv remote control web-app. Despite many technical difficulties our team was able to put together a presentable prototype by the final presentation. Our team also got out of the building to focus on market validation. We talked to dozens of potential clients and used all the feedback to further our startup idea.
On the final day we presented our project to a panel of top-notch entrepreneurs and investors. The feedback and advice we received was priceless. In the end our team was awarded a gold-plated Redbull Award for never giving up and staying up until 6AM in order to put together a proof of concept prototype for the final presentation.
