STARTUP WEEKEND
Startup Weekend was born in Boulder in July 2007. At the time, Andrew Hyde was hanging around and helping out TechStars. He was inspired by the activity around the first TechStars Boulder program and decided to get a gang together to see what it would be like to create a startup in a weekend.
Over 70 people gathered on Friday night to meet each other and brainstorm ideas. There were about 40 different projects, which quickly got narrowed down to 5 that were voted on. The most popular was VoSnap, a simple mobile polling app that became the basis for all the work over the next 48 hours.
Seth Levine, another of my Foundry Group partners, and I provided the food, which included pizza, beer, soda, pretzels, bagels, and a bunch of chocolate stuff. Although I didn’t stay the entire weekend, I met a number of new entrepreneurial friends, many whom were working for other startups at the time. We all found Startup Weekend to be a great way to experience the process of a startup while meeting a bunch of peers.
Andrew ran about 80 Startup Weekends around the world before selling Startup Weekend to Marc Nager and Clint Nelsen in 2009, who were quickly joined by a third partner, Franck Nouyrigat. Marc, Clint, and Franck turned Startup Weekend into a 501c(3); got a bunch of smart people involved as advisors, such as David Cohen; expanded rapidly; got a grant from the Kauffman Foundation; and are doing hundreds of Startup Weekends a year around the world.
Following is a current ...
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