Inaugural “Brentford Dragons” Event A Tremendous Success
The Brentford Dragons event at UWL’s Pillars Restaurant proved to be a rip-roaring success. Four sets of students pitched their business ideas to a large audience representing many diverse businesses from Brentford and beyond to the Brentford Dragons. The ideas included a one stop wedding shop, sushi food roll, student online social media, and real time information (RTI) software for mobiles. The students were allowed five minutes to pitch and another five minutes for questions from the dragons and audience.
Our four dragons, all Chamber members, were Jan Riley, from Blond Events, Brad Candy from Octink, Donald Kerr from Brentford FC and Ross Wilkie from GSK. They asked some probing questions of the students. The evening was superbly compered by Deborah Hall, formerly of the BBC.
Guests were greeted on arrival with a excellent choice of wines and platters of delicious hot and cold canapés. There followed a tremendous two course meal, with coffee and petit fours. All of the food was prepared by the Students and was of an exceptionally high standard. The silver service waiters were also student staff who coped admirably on the night.
Following the obligatory refreshing libation, guests were invited to take their seats to watch the Students present their ideas to the Dragons. The winning presentation, which was unanimously agreed by the Dragons, was “Student Loop” a software to allow social interaction between students at a variety of Universities. The primary purpose is to allow Students to connect with other students outside their immediate circle so that they can work on projects together (and to socialise). They won due to a well thought out idea and the fact that they had conducted their own market research. They did however need to work on how to make money out of it!
The Students won a year’s free membership of Brentford Chamber, which will offer the students a good opportunity to meet business people outside of the university environment in a positive way. The real prize is of course they way they rose to the challenge and made a clear winning presentation to a room full of total strangers, a stressful event for even the most hardy presenter!
Daniel Bignell, on behalf of the Student Loop team, said “Aside from the anxiety of pitching to not just a panel of renowned Dragons but also to a room full of business owners and entrepreneurs from different industries, we were overwhelmed by the support that we received from everybody. Winning the event was a huge honour for us and a great learning curve for the future being that we’re still a young company. We’ve gained a lot of confidence in ourselves and our venture thanks to the Brentford Chamber of Commerce and the Dragons event and can’t stress enough what an opportunity it can be for other people with business ideas.”
Pillars Restaurant is presenting a series of themed dinners on Wednesday and Friday evenings in May http://www.uwl.ac.uk/pillars/Menus.jsp and we would encourage our members to introduce others to the gastronomic delights on offer. Pillars is open for lunch four days a week, Tuesday-Friday. The quality of their food is not reflected by the price and we strongly advise visiting.