Ionescu Technologies

Who better to help than someone who’s already walked the same path?
Participants in this year’s MoshPit student business plan competition will have the assistance of a number of advisors, including Michael Ionescu, an entrepreneur and MoshPit alum.
While attending the Johns Hopkins University, Ionescu was twice a finalist in the Greater Baltimore Technology Council’s student competition. Ionescu has since tweaked his final, third-place idea and founded Ionescu Technologies LLC.
MoshPit is a business plan competition where Maryland students come up with their own ideas, pitch those ideas to student “employees” and then compete to see which business plan seems most successful in the eyes of judges from the business community.
Ionescu said the concentration on laying out a business plan was a valuable learning tool — especially for a creative writing major who had little in the way of advanced business courses and not a great deal of engineering skill.
“It makes you focus on the overall picture of what a business is, what you really need to do to bring everything to a success,” he said.
Ionescu said the criticism and advice of MoshPit’s advisors were key to his growth as an entrepreneur, as were the connections he made there, in what he said was one of his earliest and most important networking opportunities. In fact, his former advisor, Vasilios Peros, is now his intellectual property lawyer.
Ionescu approached the tech council about possibly being a MoshPit advisor because he wanted the chance to help other fledgling entrepreneurs.
“I had such a great experience at being a student there … that I felt it was my responsibility to give back any help that I could,” Ionescu said.
Steve Kozak, the tech council’s executive director, said Ionescu was like a “rock star” at a recent gathering of advisors and students. He said the assistance and experience of entrepreneurs such as Ionescu give the students real examples of what they can do if they set the bar high enough.
“It gives them the tools, the resources, the know-how to actually start a business,” Kozak said.
MoshPit has grown significantly in its five years of existence. There were 19 entries the first year and 88 last year. This year had 174, which he said the committee was forced to whittle down to only 40 presenting teams, although at least 120 were good enough to compete.
The committee will select six or seven finalists who will make their final pitches April 28. They will compete for a share of $30,000 in prize money.
Ionescu sees a lot of promise in this year’s crop of MoshPit participants. He was especially impressed that so many of the students have already put in so much work on their business plans, and already realize how much more work remains if they want to win.
“That’s what I attribute any kind of success to — how much time you’re willing to put into it,” Ionescu said.
In the fray
Ionescu’s drive has brought him to space in the Johns Hopkins Eastern campus in the Emerging Technology Center’s incubator program. The ETC is one of the sponsors of MoshPit. Being around like-minded entrepreneurs — who provide ready contacts as well as intelligent problem-solvers — has been helpful, he said.
“It’s the market of people who are right there — who are right next to the business,” Ionescu said.
His company’s product is a Web-based kiosk he’s marketing to hotels in the Baltimore area. Ionescu said the self-contained machines will give visitors a simple way to learn about the city while giving advertisers a simple way to build business.
“The whole service is about giving the hotel customers more information about the city around them,” Ionescu said. “To help them develop a more keen eye of what’s around them and what they can do.”
John N. Fini is the ETC’s executive director for technology initiatives. He said his role is to mentor the technology tenants such as Ionescu, making their life as simple as possible while guiding their budding business to success.
“The only way the ETC gets judged is the success of our companies, so our interest and their interests are completely aligned,” Fini said.Fini said programs such as MoshPit are important because the only way to learn to be an entrepreneur is to go out and do it. He said you can take all the classes in the world and talk to all the most experienced advisors, but the ultimate lesson can only come by going out in the world and trying to turn one of your ideas into reality.