Moot Corp > Official Rules and Submission Requirements

Official Rules and Submission Requirements

The Venture Labs Investment Competition (VLIC) and the qualifying competitions are designed to mimic the real world process of raising venture capital. The competition is for graduate students to gain real experience in this process while developing and growing new ventures based either on their own ideas and technologies or those developed by others.

The spirit of the competition is to allow companies conceived and developed during the graduate school experience to participate. This means excluding companies that were started before graduate school admission or are an expansion of an established business.

This document sets out guidelines to capture these goals. Not every circumstance can be anticipated. The directors reserve the right to disqualify any team that violates the rules, regulations or the spirit of the competition. Any questions regarding eligibility should be sent to the VLIC Director, Rob Adams. A subcommittee of other competition directors will make the call on situations that are not directly covered in these rules.

Competition directors and faculty advisors are responsible for ensuring their teams meet these requirements. The teams are also responsible for ensuring their own eligibility. Violations by the teams will result in the school being ineligible in this year’s and the following year’s competition and forfeiture of awards and prize money.

IP Considerations:

• Teams requiring non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) should not participate.

• All sessions of the competition are open to the public and may be broadcast to interested persons through media which may include radio, television and the Internet.

• Any data or information discussed or divulged throughout the competition should be considered information that will enter the public domain.

• All qualifying competitions, the affiliated universities, the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business and the organizer of the Venture Labs Investment Competition may make photocopies, photographs, video recordings and/or audio recordings of the presentations including the business plan and other documents, charts, media or other material prepared for use in presentation at VLIC.

• The above entities may use the materials in any book or other printed materials and any videotape or other medium that they may produce, provided that any profits earned from the sale of such items is used by these entities solely to defray the costs of future Venture Labs Investment or affiliated Competitions. These entities have non-exclusive world rights in all languages, and in all media, to use or to publish the materials in any book, other printed materials, videotapes or other medium, and to use the materials in future editions thereof and derivative products.

Written Plans:

• Plans should be submitted as a single, printable PDF file. Plans are limited to no more than 10 pages (not including a single cover page and single table of contents page) and can include up to 6 additional pages of appendices.

• Page format is 1.5 line spacing with 1 inch top, bottom, left and right margins, and 12 point font. This line spacing and font requirement applies to the textual content of the document and not to titles and descriptions accompanying pictures, graphs, tables or worksheets. All pages must be numbered excluding the cover page. The cover page must include venture name and university affiliation.

• Financial data should include cash flow, income statement, and balance sheet details.

• Include an explanation of the offering to investors indicating how much money is required, how it will be used and the proposed structure of the deal.

• Delineate the exit strategies if equity is part of the offering.

• Appendices should be included only when they support the findings, statements and observations in the plan.

Presentation Rules:

• Individual competitions will set their own time constraints for presentations and question and answer sessions and may include non-traditional forms of competition.

• At the Global VLIC, the presentation format is 30 minutes running clock for all rounds except the final round, which is 45 minutes running clock.

• Each member of the team present at the competition must participate fully in the formal presentation of the plan.

• Teams may not observe other teams’ sessions in their division until after they have presented their own plan.

• Each team needs to supply its own PC-compatible laptop computer and is responsible for assuring it works with the provided audio-visual equipment in advance of their presentation.

Student Involvement: The competition is for student created, managed, and owned ventures. This is the most common area for requested rules clarification. The guidelines are:

• Students played a major role in conceiving the venture by having key management roles and owning significant equity in the venture.

• Significant equity is 50% or more of the equity allocated to the management team and key advisors.

• The objective of this rule is to exclude ventures formed and managed by non-students who have token student representation to compete on the investment circuit.

Team Composition: This is a competition for graduate students; teams with a minority of undergraduates can compete. Students from any graduate program (not just MBAs) are eligible to participate, including executive and evening format programs. Non-students may be members of the venture’s management team and may participate in planning the venture, however only students may participate in the competition.

Any team participating in an undergraduate competition, regardless of team re-configuration, is disqualified from the Venture Labs Investment Competition.

Student Enrollment: The competition is for students currently enrolled in graduate school. Executive or evening program formats are eligible in the next competition season following their graduation if they did not graduate on a traditional (month of May) graduation schedule.

Exceptions will be made for students who both wrote their business plans for academic credit and graduated during the preceding summer and for students from universities south of the equator not having a traditional (month of May) graduation timeframe.

Nature of Ventures: Companies must intend to be operating companies with corporate structures and financial statements that reflect real operating revenues and expenses. This is intended to exclude investment vehicles, partnerships, licensing and other pass-through entities where returns are measured for investment value versus operating earnings.

The competition focuses on new, independent ventures in the seed, start-up or early growth stages. In addition to what is outlined in the above paragraph, generally excluded are the following: buy-outs, expansions of existing companies, roll-ups, real estate syndications, tax shelters, franchise based outlets, licensing agreements for distribution in a different geographical area and spin-outs from existing corporations.

Licensing technologies from universities or research labs is encouraged assuming there has been no previous commercialization. Key in these types of ventures is demonstrating significant added value to the technology through the efforts of the management team.

All ventures must be seeking outside equity capital.

Prior Activity: Ventures and their base concepts may compete for only one season in the Venture Labs Investment Competition or in any of the qualifying competitions. Also, ventures may not compete in any VLIC qualifying competitions after they have competed in the Venture Labs Investment Competition.

University Sponsorship and Faculty Adviser Involvement: The business plan must be prepared under faculty supervision. Ideally, the business plan will be prepared for credit in a regularly scheduled course or as an independent study. The business plan must represent the original work of members of the team. All universities with participating teams are strongly encouraged to send faculty or other university advisors to the team to most, if not all, all of the competitions in which their teams compete.

Bids to VLIC qualifying Competitions must be accepted by a team’s faculty adviser. The faculty adviser must, on behalf of the sponsoring university, attest to the eligibility of team, their adherence to the rules and guidelines and acknowledge potential penalties for violations and infractions.

Dropping Out of a Competition: If a team withdraws or does not compete in a competition after accepting a bid the team and university will be subject to disqualification from competing in the Venture Labs Investment Competition and any other VLIC qualifying competition for that year and the following year, a two year ban. All violations will be reported to the Competition Directors Committee by the subject Competition Director with documentation of the violation.