SEMA Show, Las Vegas - November, 2013
Funding Garage's CEO, Dominic Lin, Delivers Speech on Promoting Innovation and Educational Competition at SEMA Show 2013
Dominic Lin, founder and CEO of Funding Garage Inc. received the honor of being a top five finalist in the 2013 SEMA Launch Pad Competition that celebrated the automotive industry’s brightest and most promising young entrepreneurs. The event was hosted by the SEMA Young Executive Network (YEN).
Below is the written speech Lin prepared and delivered for the panel of industry judges: Jim Liaw, president of Formula Drift; Doug Evans, executive vice president and group publisher for Source Interlink Media; Ronald L. Coleman, ownership partner, president and CEO of COMP Performance Group; Greg Adler, president and CEO of Transamerican Auto Parts; and Jeffrey Yapp, vice president of global automotive engineering and operations for UPS.
Hi my name is Dominic Lin and I am here to speak to you about Funding Garage Inc. I am here to share with you two things that are important to me today, and I want to start by asking you how much money do you think it takes college students to operate a college Formula SAE team each year? $2000? $5000? Our study shows that it takes anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 or more to fully operate as a team annually. No wonder there are schools that simply do not have the resources to participate in these hands-on experiences. Even large institutions like University of Arizona Formula SAE team is on a rotating two years program; one year they are doing development, one year they compete. Why? because they simply cannot afford to race every year. Students are missing out, and it is our obligation to change that for the betterment of our future.
Funding Garage believes in supporting educational competitions. The future of the automotive industry depends on the talents going through educational programs. By exposing future talent to hands on learning through competition, it reinforces in real life situations what is learned on the textbook in the classrooms.
As an industry we constantly celebrate innovations around the world. There are Automotive Achievement Awards like the AOL Technology of the Year Award, SPE Innovations Award, PACE Awards, SEMA New Product Award which focuses on celebrating achievements in the OEM and Supply Base. There are also Incentivized Prize Awards like XPrize, DARPA Challenge, which allows universities and companies to compete in a mission driven environment.
However, there’s an area that I believe is consistently being neglected; it's the area of emerging disruptive technologies. Innovations in this area don’t typically qualify for Automotive Achievement Awards because they are not yet installed on production vehicles, and most of the times they also don’t always qualify for Incentivized Prize Awards because they don’t fit the criteria the competition is looking for. I recently met a driven, passionate entrepreneur that developed a voice system that outperforms Siri, can you imagine that? Why is it taking him and his talented team of developers almost a decade to get noticed by the automakers? There’s an invisible wall that people just can’t break through!
Funding Garage believes in building a robust pathway for high potential disruptive technologies to get the resources they need in order to rapidly reach commercialization.
I founded the Funding Garage Movement a year ago, and with a motivate team of trusted board members we went after the mission to solve these problems that are plaguing the innovation pipeline. Do you know why these schools are having such a problem fundraising for their projects? A few months ago I randomly visited three Formula SAE team websites and tried to give money away, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how. Finally I found one Formula SAE team website that had a link to the university’s e-giving service but wow did it remind me of filling out a college application. The donation process is inefficient and not sexy at all. Funding Garage is changing all of that.
With our community fundraising platform students can embed the fundraising campaign directly on their website, process secure transactions via Paypal and/or credit card with only a few clicks, and the best feature of all is the ability to pair unique rewards with different levels of contribution. If donating $500 means I can take the FormulaSAE car out for a spin at a local autocross event, I might just do it! We are launching a series of workshop in collaboration with the Southern California Performance Educational Organization as well as Vital Link of Orange County to help 30+ high schools and colleges raise funding for educational competition using the community fundraising platform on Funding Garage. We also offer resources beyond fundraising during these workshops to assist teams on the car building process.
Automotive companies love disruptive innovations so much that in the past five years most of the major automakers established research labs in Silicon Valley to get visibility to them. I hope that means soon we will be able to use Touch ID to start a car and have a driver facing camera built in the dashboard to do video conferencing with your kids while you travel on business.
Nissan-Renault and Delphi just opened doors earlier this year. With the automakers opened-arm and eager to engage in the start-up world of the tech industry, most inventors are wondering how to actually get some seat time with them. In collaboration with these companies, Funding Garage plans to launch a series of Innovation Invitationals in 2014; establishing Funding Garage as the world’s largest dating site for disruptive entrepreneurs and auto companies. People with innovations in development will have an opportunity to submit their portfolios and funding proposals for evaluation with participating auto companies and a chance to be awarded financial, material, or knowledge resources as an end result. Through our affiliate Auto Harvest, they will also get connections with key resources within the industry.
We have to recognize a couple of things here. The students of today will be the professionals of tomorrow. Disruptive technologies of today will become the mainstream features of the vehicles in the future. It is our obligation as a community to find ways to encourage innovation through competition and furthermore provide the opportunity for the best technologies to surface to the top.
If you are interested in knowing more about me, my team, or want to get involved with the Funding Garage Movement, I would be glad to speak with you.
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