Sushi Chipotle Pitch Wins

Shaan tells a story about how he became an entrepreneur through a college pitch competition.

"I did a pitch competition my senior year, second semester. I had never even thought about business before that. I ended up winning 25 grand and it changed the direction of my life. I literally wouldn't have been an entrepreneur had that not happened.

We had two things going for us. We had the most swag of anyone at the pitch competition. I brought the Duke basketball players in as a cameo during the pitch - they threw out t-shirts to the crowd. We won extra money from the fans.

Also, one of the judges was worth about $20-50 million because he owned 50 Applebee's. He thought 'restaurant industry, great industry to be in' whereas 99% of the population would have said that's a terrible idea. But this guy had made his living off of Applebee's, so we had one judge in the bag.

The funny part is after winning, they also paid for an MBA student to work for us as an intern. We were younger than this guy who had 7 years of real world experience. We just had him work on an Excel model for 5 months - he must have thought it was the worst experience of his life."