Eric Maltais didn't sleep the night before he had to pitch before a group of seven judges who would decide if he would win $100,000 for his company, Immertec.
But it wasn't nerves that kept him up — well, not entirely nerves. At 4 a.m. Wednesday morning, 12 hours before he needed to pitch to judges, Maltais was at the local Starbucks paying homeless people to visit and critique his pitch.
"At 4 a.m. I thought 'I'm too close to this,'" he said. "So then I took $100 in 5 dollar bills and I went to Starbucks and paid homeless people to listen to my pitch. I did it for different people until they could tell me what my business did. I got perspective outside my own brain, which is difficult to do."
It's possibly the most nontraditional way to conduct a focus group yet: but it worked. Maltais was chosen out of eight local startups by D.C. based think tank Revolution to receive a $100,000 prize. The pitching was part of the Rise of the Rest tour, which travels across the country beyond California, New York and Massachusetts to showcase other states with startups that could receive funding. The tour set out across the state of Florida earlier this week and made its way to Tampa Bay on May 1.
"Of course there's a lot that's going on, we've been working hard, but you can have a great idea and traction and if you don't communicate it well, it doesn't matter," he said. "This is a four minute topic — (today) my life gets measured in four minutes."
Linda Olson, executive director of incubator/accelerator Tampa Bay Wave, pushed for five years to have the Rise of the Rest give rise to Tampa Bay. For Olson, the day got an extra win — literally — when Immertec was chosen. Immertec has been part of the Wave's post accelerator program for the last year.
"This is why we try to stress we really, truly are — we're by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs," Olson said after wiping tears from her eyes. "I feel that joy and know how hard he's worked, how much it means to him. All these companies deserved to win but it's the personal connection, it makes me a little emotional to see him win. He deserves it."
But despite Maltais living in St. Petersburg the last nine years, Tampa Bay was not always an obvious choice for Immertec. The company's technology debuted at the Facebook headquarters in 2017 in San Francisco and at first, Maltais and his team questioned the decision to relocate to Tampa.
"We really took a difficult decision to have our company come back here and raise money locally," he said. "But we realized after this event (with Rise of the Rest) we're not the only ones. We thought we were crazy at first."
As for the future, Immertec's close to closing a seed round fund that would help the company's 12 employees expand to hire his 10 unpaid interns for full-time positions and further solidify relationships in the medical device world.
Maltais plans to use the funds in a move more startups are heading toward: creating a positive office culture. A separate fund with the 100,000 will be created and a committee will be formed to best decide how to use the funds to better office culture.
"I'm nothing without the people around me," he said.
