Venture idol: competition puts state entrepreneurs before national judging panel.

• Author: Hromadka, Erik
• Position: AROUND INDIANA

JEFF READY WASN'T planning to officially launch his new company when he left for a luncheon at the Indiana Historical Society during last month's Entrepreneurship Week.

The sold-out Indiana Venture Club event featured a speech by Keith Krach, a 1979 Purdue graduate who co-founded e-commerce giant Ariba and was Ernst & Young's national Entrepreneur of the Year in 2000. After lunch, Ready found himself on stage pitching his idea for Scale Computing to Krach and two other judges in Indiana's Venture Idol competition.

There was no singing or dancing and little sign of the crazy personalities that are drawn to the bright lights of the popular American Idol television show, upon which the competition was based. However, Indiana University's Dr. Donald Kuratko played host and kept the show moving as well as Ryan Seacrest.

Krach was joined by fellow judges Gary Anderson (as Simon?) who serves as senior advisor for TL Ventures, a leading national venture capital firm with offices in Pennsylvania and California, and Mary Lincoln Campbell, managing director of EDF Ventures in Michigan.

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Together they reviewed 21 aspiring business leaders from around Indiana who took to the stage for a lightening round of one-minute presentations. Some attempted to wow the judges with bold statements about new medical treatments and devices. Others gave quick demonstrations of their products, like the CEO of Ecotots, who demonstrated how his line of children's furniture could be assembled without tools. And few flubbed their lines under the bright lights.

"Who is your competition and why do they keep you up at night?" Krach asked in one of the many questions fired by the judges after each presentation. "So what exactly does your company do and why would I pay for that?" asked Campbell. "You mentioned monitoring five vital signs on patients, which ones?" demanded Anderson.

After each round of questioning, audience members ranked each presentation on a scale of one to 10 and the top eight were invited back to make a second five-minute presentation.

That's where Ready found himself pitching the opportunities of Scale Computing, his Greenwood-based company that has developed a new type of computer storage solution that he claims can reduce costs by 75 percent. Ready, who got his computer science degree...