Having a great idea for a company is one thing. Getting the money to get it moving and growing is quite another — especially when you’ve got an unconventional product or business model that your average investor isn’t likely to recognize as an obvious winner. When we started TerraCycle as undergrads, my co-founder and I entered and won a number of business-plan competitions around America, effectively financing our business from the resulting prize money. The best thing about prize money is that it provides financing without diluting your ownership in the company; the challenge of relying on prize money is that it is relatively limited — $5,000 to $100,000, generally, and you can’t enter the same contest more than once, especially if you do well the first time.