• Tim Newcomb

Would-be entrepreneurs at the University of Vermont received a bracing shot of good news last Thursday: A new business competition has been founded that will yield annual awards worth more than $200,000.

The Joy and Jerry Meyers Cup contest, which starts in the fall semester, establishes a cash award for the undergraduate or team that comes up with a great idea and a solid plan for turning it into a business. Team members can be from any department or major at UVM, but at least one must be a senior who, after graduating, will make a full-time job of establishing the business.

Chip and Louise Meyers are California residents who created and named the prize in honor of Chip's parents, who graduated from UVM in the 1950s. The couple plan to donate $250,000 annually for a decade to pay for the award. Finalists and winners are also promised mentoring and professional advice worth thousands of dollars from local entrepreneurs, investors, accountants and lawyers.

The first-place cash prize, which is expected to be worth about $212,000, is intended to provide living expenses for the young entrepreneurs while they turn their business idea into a going concern. The rest of the $250,000 goes to administrative expenses and a $2,000 award that semifinalists receive before the finals to help them prepare.

"I've found if you're doing a startup, usually you're scraping by. You have your full-time job, and you're working on this on the side," said Chip Meyers, a serial entrepreneur who owns a technology business. He noted that Hula, the Burlington coworking and tech incubator space owned by entrepreneur Russ Scully, has pledged to provide free office space to the winners. "We wanted to make sure they really did this for two years and gave it the full shot," Meyers said.

The size of the Meyers Cup cash prize is unheard of in Vermont, where awards in most business competitions max out at $20,000 or so. Other programs rely on providing participants free access to experts, investors and well-connected mentors who can help businesses take off. Those contests have aided some founders in creating successful companies, including Mamava, Benchmark Space Systems and Vermont Tortilla. But they don't provide enough money for people to work full time on their startups. 

Champlain College has a pitch competition in which individuals can win $500. Last Thursday, UVM's Grossman School of Business held its annual contest, in which winners bring home up to $1,200. 

Adults no longer in school have options to enter similar competitions, including the Lake Champlain Chamber's LaunchVT. A cohort of seven companies will pitch their business ideas to investors at an event in mid-June. The winners last year took home $15,000. 

Some business contests are more whimsical. FreshTracks Capital, a Shelburne-based venture capital firm, holds a one-day event, Peak Pitch, each winter. Entrepreneurs make their case to investors while standing in the lift line or riding up the chairlift at Sugarbush Resort.

Do North Coworking, which is affiliated with Northern Vermont University-Lyndon, is also launching a pitch competition this year. Do North manager Jared Reynolds, who also runs a forest industry business contest, is raising money from sponsors for a new event in September that will allow any startup to participate in workshops and compete for cash prizes. 

But without a bigger purse, entrepreneurs who win those contests often have to keep their day jobs. That was the case for Akshata Nayak, who was part of a LaunchVT cohort last year.

In 2021, Nayak founded a company called Little Patakha that creates children's books and other learning materials aimed at teaching youngsters to appreciate cultural diversity and overcome stereotypes. She and her husband co-own a wellness center where both work as nutritionists; her husband is also a chiropractor. 

Taking time away from her job to reinvent Little Patakha — which she'd started as a language learning company — put a strain on the family's finances, Nayak said. 

"You're either supporting yourself at your job or you have a spouse trying to support both of you and the family, so it puts you in a lot of financial pressure," she said.

Most rewarding for Nayak were the connections she made through LaunchVT. She had started her business without a sound grasp of financial fundamentals. 

"I didn't know how to do projections; I didn't know how to speak about it confidently because I didn't know the basics," she said. 

Her new mentors gave her pointers. She's still working with them. "I am way more confident about it than I was before," Nayak said.

The new UVM competition will provide students with that kind of one-on-one relationship. Associate professor Erik Monsen, who has been teaching entrepreneurship at UVM's Grossman School of Business for eight years, is working with the Meyers family and the local business accelerators that will provide technical assistance and mentoring for students in the competition.

Monsen said the group is looking for businesses that plan to stay in Vermont and have an environmental or social justice component. 

The contest will stretch over the course of a school year. Applications are due in September, and 10 semifinalists will be chosen to present their ideas to a panel of local experts in November. Those judges will select three to five individuals or groups, each of which will get $2,000 to develop their concept further. They'll all receive business training from November until April, when they'll pitch their ideas to a panel made up of Chip and Louise Meyers, their three sons, and two people from UVM. That group will select a winner. 

"This is really going to help set us apart in the entrepreneur field," said Barbara Arel, the acting dean of the Grossman School of Business, which will administer the award. 

Chip and Louise — a tax attorney and former IRS litigator — met when they were attending the University of Southern California. They chose UVM to honor Chip's parents, who met at the school and had a house in Stowe for 30 years. The family loves Vermont, both said, and Chip's parents are buried in a cemetery in Stowe. Two of his father's fraternity brothers, now in their nineties, attended the Meyers Cup announcement at UVM on April 26. 

In the course of working with UVM over the past 18 months to design the prize program, the Meyers became familiar with Chittenden County's fast-growing startup ecosystem, which includes mainstays such as Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, Hula and FreshTracks.

In the past few years, investment in Burlington-area companies has accelerated dramatically. Capital from inside and outside Vermont totaled $637 million in 2021 and $584 million last year, according to Cairn Cross, who cofounded FreshTracks. In 2020, that figure was just $106 million. 

The number of investments — a signal that the Burlington area is seeing growth in a diverse collection of industries — has grown too, Cross noted. Entrepreneurs have access to sizable new pots of money such as the Dudley Fund, which launched last year with the aim of injecting $12.5 million into Vermont startups.

"I can't get over the support and infrastructure that is there for somebody to try to do a startup business," Chip Meyers said.

Chip's focus is UVM, where his parents, who grew up in the New York metro area, learned to love the outdoors. He wants to help the school thrive.  

"In terms of recruiting athletes, this is just like recruiting young entrepreneurs," Chip said. "These kids are all over the world. To say, 'Come to UVM, and you can really fulfill your dreams' — that's what I am hoping they're going to get from this."