First of all, I was really nervous because I really believe the iRead is a great product and that it could really mean a change for a lot of people. The afternoon started with Eddie coming to my place to help me with the final touches for my presentation, mispelling and mispronunciation. After a few attempts the presentation seemed to be nice and fluent.
I put on my best attire and I was ready to leave.
When I got to the 12th floor of 73 Tremont there where 10 chairs that made me assume there were going to be 10 presentations, 10 mins each. People started to come, some of them quiet and some other more chatty. One of them even dared to ask about other´s inventions, haha, nobody wanted to show their cards! (neither did I ;) )
Dr. Bhatia came and everyone shut up. He told us to cheer up because we had nothing to lose, $50,000 at the most! haha that statement wouldn´t relax us as much as he thought.
As Dr.Bhatia was telling us the order to present, I had the felling I was going to be the last one, and I wasn´t mistaken. I was second to last to present, almost 3 hours waiting until it was my turn. I had lunch at 2, and I left 73 Tremont at 9 with just a bottle of water.
When it was my turn, there were at least 20 people to judge my presentation, the work of about 3 months. I was really nervous but I tried to keep calm and I tried to do as I once heard in a TED.com video, all I had to do is "pretend to be a good presenter."
They had a clicker that didn´t work and somebody told me "don´t worry, it never worked" to which I replied "don´t worry, I brought mine." I think it´s really important that I brought my own clicker, the book in braille, my slides and my ipad. You have to be prepare if you want to succeed.
I started my presentation and everyone seemed really engaged, there was people nodding their head like "yes, you are right", others were kind of smiling like "how did you think of that?" and others were patiently listening. Not everything went smooth, I remember turning to the screen and saying "Whaaat? there should be a screen full of holes here!" For some reason the projector wouldn´t show the holes on the picture of the screen of the iRead .
The presentation went well, if not great. The judges were amazingly kind and they all listened to my presentation with entusiasm. When it came to the Q&A, there are three sentences I would like to highlight. One of them told me "it was a fantastic presentation" to which all I can say is THANK YOU. Other sentence that made me really happy was "I love your passion", THANK YOU and yes, I really love my product, and I really want to fight for it to win. And a question that I loved was "Why would companies like The New York Times want to develop apps for your iRead?" THANKS for the question and, of course they will, they sell information, the more they spread it the better. I have no doubt that they will love to develop apps for the iRead.
I got home at 9.30pm, I had a bagel and started doing homework. At 11.30 it was already too late. It was time to sleep. I went to sleep with a smile in my face because, even though I don´t know if I will win, the experience and knowing that about 20 people sat there and loved my presentation and my product was priceless.
No comments:
Post a Comment