‘From Excited to Moved’ — Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Response to the Hello World Pitch Competition
Mayor Pete’s thoughts after watching 7 students pitch business ideas at Hello World: A Pitch Competition From Nowhere, USA with Cyan Banister.
Last night was a special one.
Inside a former Studebaker factory building, seven middle and high school students competed in South Bend Code School’s Hello World: A Pitch Competition From Nowhere, USA.
Hello World was born after Cyan Banister, a partner at the San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund and investor with a portfolio including Uber and SpaceX, visited South Bend on the tail end of a bus tour through the Midwest. Three days after the tour we received a direct message on Twitter from Cyan expressing that she’d like to support companies started by our students. You can read more of that story here.
Over the past few months, the students have worked individually or in small teams to develop tech-related business ideas designed to solve real-world problems and build working prototypes of those ideas.
Last night, they pitched.
As soon as final pitch was over and the judges were preparing to decide the winners, Mayor Pete, who spoke at the beginning of the night, asked if he could respond to what we had just witnessed:
I don’t usually invite myself to give additional speeches, but I just wanted to tell you how over the last hour I went from being excited to being moved.
So what I saw was how you handled not just the technology, but yourselves. You’ve learned how to use these tools. You’ve also learned how to formulate a plan with frankly a lot more cohesion than some of the people who ask for taxpayer support. You’ve learned how to deal with surprises that happen all of the time — your speech falls off the stand, the wi-fi doesn't work like you think it would, your water bottle didn’t work like you think it would — I’ve been there! And it didn’t slow you down at all. I can’t believe that you are 16, 15, 14…
Most of all you’ve learned how to tell a story, and that is really important. This is a community that’s re-learning how to tell our story. And so I guess the thing I want to ask of you, or challenge you to do, is in the years to come I hope you will really think about how your story fits into this community’s story, and how South Bend’s story is part of your story. I will need people with your skills, not just your coding skills, which are really impressive, but your other skills — adaptation, storytelling — to really shape this community.
People will be competing over you, so you might get some chances to leave this community. That’s okay, although I would prefer that if you do that, you eventually come back. But either way, I hope you keep South Bend in your equation because this is really exciting stuff and you’ve already found some problems to help solve. Every community has problems; we have problems that need solutions, and they need you.
I can’t wait to see what you all do as leaders.
Up Next on the Blog
Over the coming months we will be writing about a few of the projects that were pitched in the competition, and how the students plan to leverage the new resources and exposure to grow the projects.
Here are the five businesses pitched last night:
🥇 Ideator, David and Matthew
A platform designed to connect those with ideas with those who have specific skillsets but might be lacking in ideas.
🥈 Film Me In, Lukas
A movie search platform helping you to find the best movies you’ve never seen, while creating efficient ways to search.
🥉 ED.iana, Alison
A website aimed at helping middle schoolers find local colleges that foster their unique interests and goals.
Board Meeting, Mateo
A get-together website specifically aimed at increasing a restaurant or coffee shop’s business by connecting game enthusiasts.
Misthos, Dominic and Matthew
A website looking to show high schoolers job opportunities that can be earned without a college degree.
