‘Tis the season to be merry, and as the fourth quarter concludes and temperatures in New York City drop below freezing, entrepreneurs deserve an extra boost of the holiday spirit.

For decades, California’s Silicon Valley has been the world’s powerhouse for high-tech research, innovation and development...

VC giant Y Combinator has a notorious two-and-a-half minute time limit for startup founders to present their pitches; only two and a half minutes to explain why a brand new product is valuable, innovative, and profitable. While most VCs and incubators give founders more time to describe their ideas (six minutes in Quake’s University Investor Series), startup founders can learn a lot from the fast-paced pitch structure that YC demands.

October 27th marked the first session of Quake’s monthly University Investor Series (UIS), a virtual pitchfest during which student entrepreneurs presented to a panel of pre-seed and early seed stage investors. In the inaugural meeting, conducted via Google Hangouts, fifteen teams from eleven schools across the country pitched to five experienced investors.