Founded in 2007 in Boulder, CO by Andrew Hyde, StartupWeekend has grown to attract the support of the Kauffman Foundation. In September of last year, the KF awarded SW a grant that has allowed them to scale the program quite rapidly. As of this past December, the 54 hour long weekend has taken place 207 times across 120 cities in 35 countries.
What’s so cool about SW is a lot of curious entrepreneurs come together, many of whom are meeting each other for the first time, to interact in an environment where they can explore their ideas for new products and services. A lot of ideas pitched are rough sketches and serve as starting points for potential new products and services, but come the end of the weekend some of them mature to a point where they hold enough steam to make it to market one day.
Today is actually the third SW NYC of the year. Both Mike and Oren will be in attendance. I’ll be hanging back to organize a few posts about the event as Oren’s video footage hits our YouTube page (we uploaded numerous videos from the last SW NYC and wrote a few posts following the event).
As per the title of the post, one thing we’re starting to notice is the number of SW’s popping up in places outside of NYC. Like this one to be held in Ithaca in September and this one to be held in Syracuse in November. During the spring semester Rochester will host their own SW as well. It has also been rumored Binghamton and Buffalo have interest in organizing SW at some point over the next year.
Never been to a SW? See this post Mitchell Patterson wrote about what to expect from your first SW. He attend SW NYC this past June and is helping co-organize SW Syracuse this November.
