Beedie students grab gold at Pacific Venture Capital Competition

The Beedie School of Business PVCC 2015 team with guest speaker Vikram Vij. From left to right: Vikram Vij, Maria Villaseñor, Denis Zaryanov, Vlad Manchash. Seated: Michael Dyatchenko.

A team of Beedie School of Business students saw off stiff competition from top business schools from across the globe to take home the gold medal in the Venture Capital Competition at the seventh annual Pacific Venture Capital Conference and Competition.

BBA students Michael Dyatchenko, Vlad Manchash, Denis Zaryanov, and Maria Villaseñor emerged victorious from a field consisting of 23 top tier schools including Cornell University, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Rotman School of Management at the University of Ontario, NYU Stern, University of California Berkeley, and Singapore Management University.

The Pacific Venture Capital Conference and Competition (PVCC) is a national competition designed for undergraduate and MBA students to present business ideas and financial valuations to an audience of entrepreneurial leaders, senior venture capitalists, and top industry professionals across North America.

The event, held this year at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver on March 5, features both entrepreneurship and venture capital components. Teams competing in the Venture Capital Competition are required to evaluate the pitches of the Entrepreneurship Competition finalists and present their investment decisions to the panel of guest judges.

The Beedie team spent three weeks training, researching industries and companies, interviewing business experts and building financial models for the competition. In addition to the trophy, they earned prize money of $2,000 for their efforts.

“The PVCC experience has been a prime lesson in the value of hard work,” said Dyatchenko. “The fact that we won when faced with such a high caliber of competing schools attests to the hard work we put in. We enjoyed every minute of the competition and left exponentially more knowledgeable than when we entered.”

In addition to the student competitions, PVCC 2015 featured a number of guest speakers from the entrepreneurship and venture capital industry, including local entrepreneur and recent addition to the “Dragons” on CBC’s Dragon’s Den Vikram Vij.

For more information on PVCC, visit www.ubcpvcc.com