University of California, San Francisco Team Takes Home $150,000 Grand Prize in Garage.com's PLANedu National Student Business Plan Competition

Business Wire, May 24, 2000

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2000

Quicksilver Genomics Team Wins Final Pitch-off

Garage.com, an online venture capital company that helps entrepreneurs and investors create, build, and fund promising early-stage technology companies, announced that Quicksilver Genomics, a team from the University of California, San Francisco, won the $150,000 Grand Prize at the PLANedu Final Pitch-off and Awards Ceremony that took place last night.

PLANedu is Garage.com's national business plan competition designed to foster entrepreneurship among students.

Quicksilver's mission is to accelerate post-genomic drug discovery. The team's licensable technology enables pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic researchers to rapidly discover patentable lead compounds from unclassified gene sequences. Quicksilver's team consists of Rey Banatao, Jose Haresco, Sean Mooney, and Sandra Waugh -- all students at the University of California, San Francisco. Banatao and Haresco are both Ph.D. candidates in Medical Information Sciences; Mooney is a Ph.D. candidate in Pharmaceutical Chemistry; and Waugh is a Ph.D. Candidate in Biophysics.

"Quicksilver Genomics exemplifies the remarkable business ideas that are being developed by student entrepreneurs at universities across the country," said Garage.com CEO Guy Kawasaki. "Over the course of six weeks, more than 600 teams representing 2,000 student entrepreneurs entered our PLANedu competition. Rey, Jose, Sean, and Sandy's families should all be very proud."

After the awards ceremony, Quicksilver Genomics team captain Jose Haresco said, "To say we are happy is an understatement -- we are excited and shocked and absolutely thrilled. Winning PLANedu is really not something we expected. We started the Garage.com process mostly to learn more about business and to share our vision for how things should be done in our industry. The other four teams were really great, and it was fun to get to know each of them over the past few days."

Other PLANedu winners and their awards include:

First Prize, $50,000:

      --  KnowNow - University of California, Irvine Two-way Web-based
        event notification network

      --  Kwaish - Stanford University Wireless application distribution
        network

Second Prize, $25,000:

      --  Fluid Bandwidth - University of Texas, Austin Enterprise
        application integrator providing turnkey solutions for
        Voice-over-IP

      --  RedFolio.com - Purdue University Web-centric artificial
        intelligence engineering solution for manufacturing and
        service businesses

The five winning teams presented their business plans before a panel of industry-leading judges, including:

      --  Mike Bolton, Senior Vice President, Safeguard Scientifics
      --  Ellen Hancock, CEO, Exodus Communications
      --  Steve Jurvetson, Partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
      --  Marleen McDaniel, CEO, Women.com
      --  Geoffrey Moore, Author, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the
        Tornado
      --  Jacqueline Neufeld, Partner, Grant Thornton
      --  Michael Robertson, CEO, MP3.com
      --  Jonathan Seelig, Founder, Akamai
      --  Chris Shipley, Executive Producer, Demo conferences
      --  Bob Timpson, General Manager, Solution Developer Marketing,IBM
      --  Bob Young, Chairman and Co-founder, Red Hat

Charles Schwab, Forbes magazine, Grant Thornton, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Safeguard Scientifics, and Sprint joined Garage.com as sponsors of PLANedu.

About Garage.com

Garage.com helps entrepreneurs and investors create, build, and fund promising early-stage technology startups. In 1999, Garage.com helped 40 technology startup companies raise more than $101 million in venture capital through its wholly-owned broker/dealer subsidiary Garage.com Securities. Garage.com has headquarters in Silicon Valley, and domestic offices in Austin, Boston, and Seattle. In addition, Garage.com recently opened international offices in Israel and London to serve the Israeli and European high tech startup communities.

Important Notice: Garage.com and the Garage.com logo are trademarks of Garage.com. Additional Company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged. Garage.com is not a registered broker/dealer and engages in the offer or sale of securities only through its wholly owned broker/dealer subsidiary, Garage.com Securities. That subsidiary oversees and executes all of the securities aspects of the business while the parent company, Garage.com, manages the information aspects. The statements contained in this news release that are forward-looking are based on current expectations that are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks, and actual results may differ materially.