For entrepreneurs who have or want to start up a financial services business, here's a way to get a year's worth of mentorship, key connections, and access to 300,000 customers.
TradeKing, an online stock and option broker, is sponsoring a series of pitch events in October along with a Silicon Valley-headquartered entrepreneur mentorship program, One Million by One Million(1M/1M). Twelve winners will be selected and awarded a one year scholarship to the 1M/1M online mentorship program, as well as access to the TradeKing distribution channel to bring their products to market.
The deadline to apply to apply is Monday, September 10, 2012. Submissions take the form of a simple business plan; a sample format is available here.
TradeKing is a pioneer in integrating new financial social media as part of it trading platform and has a large customer base of 300,000 customers, which will provide a substantial launching pad for an entrepreneur who has a concept or existing business providing a financial services service or product. The program is open to entrepreneurs with financial services concepts that include online tools, mobile tools, platform SDKs, or data visualization tools. To learn more about TradeKing, read 1M/1M founder Sramana Mitra's profile of TradeKing's CIO Dan Raju on her Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series . Dan shared TradeKing's plans for an open API that would bring in entrepreneurs to develop apps on their platform, and to also open up their channel
One Million by One Million is a global initiative that aims to nurture a million entrepreneurs to reach a million dollars each in annual revenue and beyond by 2020, thereby creating a trillion dollars in global GDP and ten million jobs. Founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant Sramana Mitra, the program is designed to create a framework for Capitalism 2.0, which she envisions as distributed, democratic capitalism. 1M/1M offers a case-study-based online educational program, video lectures, lean, capital-efficient methodology guidance, online strategy consulting at public and private roundtables, as well as introductions to customers, channel partners and investors (pre-seed, seed, angel, VC, bank, alternative financing). The public roundtable is a free program accessible from anywhere in the world.
More information on the contest and how to apply can be found here.
Financial entrepreneurs: this is an excellent opportunity to get your product to market. Remember, deadline for applications is September 10.
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