Thousands of entrepreneurship enthusiasts streamed into the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston for the MassChallenge Awards Wednesday night. While a portion probably fought off the urge to throw on their Sox caps and beeline to the bar when the clock struck 8:07 p.m., the crowd remained excited and engaged in the event's agenda throughout the course of the night, and with good reason: The accelerator had $1.5 million in grants and $10 million in in-kind prizes to give away to tremendous startup talent.
Hosting the awards was actor and The Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi, who opened the ceremony cracking jokes about his Indian ethnicity being the "real reason" he was tapped to MC the evening's festivities. (The accelerator got the hook-up to Mandvi, a general supporter of entrepreneurship, through a MassChallenge finalist, who happens to be good friends with the comedian.)
After a warm welcome from Mandvi and MassChallenge founders John Hawthorne and Akhil Nigam, half of the 26 lucky winners had the opportunity to give their best one-minute pitches to the audience. Virgin Galactic CEO and Newton-born George T. Whitesides (seen above) then took to the stage to deliver the evening's keynote, and passed along a congratulatory message from Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson: "Entrepreneurship is our future, and it's the key to the future of humanity."
Along with extending his own congratulatory remarks to the winners and all 128 of the accelerator's startups, the self-proclaimed "space geek since high school" also shared the latest in Virgin's space arm's innovations.
"There are 542 people that have been to space," Whitesides said, "we want to break that radically open."
Virgin Galactic has signed on 650 people – at $2,000 a pop – to be the first batch of non-astronauts to head into space. A slide flashed a picture of Virgin's new space shuttle technology: Two high-powered, high-tech planes will flank the commercial spaceship on either side, escorting the small shuttle up into the atmosphere before dropping off and letting its rockets kick in. Whitesides also dropped that Virgin Galactic has plans to team up with reality TV producer Mark Burnett to create another Survivor-esque series in space.
Once Whitesides stepped off to hearty applause, the latter round of finalists presented their companies before the monetary prizes were doled out to the winning startups. Over the course of the night, MassChallenge and the presenters handed off 39 jumbo checks worth up to $100,000 to smiling startup teams.
In an inspiring closing message to all of MassChallenge's companies, Hawthorne noted, "Wherever there is doubt or void...don't see that void, see opportunity."
Check out all of last night's winners here.
