Second Annual Startup Weekend Columbus Spawns 12 New Ventures

Last weekend TechColumbus hosted Startup Weekend Columbus 2, a three-day event that brought together 150 of the city’s aspiring tech entrepreneurs, business owners, designers, marketers, Web engineers, investors and others for an intensive workshop, the purpose of which was to take startup ventures from concept to launch in 54 hours or less.  

A total of 75 ideas for new businesses were pitched on Friday, with 12 ventures making it through for presentations on Sunday afternoon.  Some of the promising projects that made the cut ranged in scope from Milton, a Web-based subscription service for small businesses to manage their CRM, finance, sales and other business functions easily and online; to Ticzar, a Twitter/smartphone-enabled real time secondary market ticket exchange which allows users to get last minute tickets at the best price and in a safe location; to Bouncebird, an application for organizing and managing personal Twitter accounts according to relevance, content preferences and other criteria.

The event was held at TechColumbus center and sponsored by Bricker & Eckler, dynamIT, Sandbox, Sterling Commerce, aviate, Atchley Signs, EdgeCase, Sun Microsystems and TechColumbus.  

Wil Schroter, founder of GoBig Network and serial entrepreneur, addressed the participants at Saturday’s lunch.  Schroter contends that if you want to build a team of entrepreneurs in Columbus as strong as the OSU football team, then you have to play more games.  In other words you need to have more practice at starting new companies so that you learn what does and doesn’t work and he says these companies need to be started fast so that entrepreneurs can quickly learn from experience and go on to the next venture.  This message is certainly reflected in the intensity and the accelerated pace represented by Startup Weekend’s 54-hour timeframe.  

“For the second year in a row, Startup Weekend Columbus brought together some of the leading entrepreneurial minds in the community,” says Chris Anderson, business startup specialist with TechColumbus and one of the event’s organizers.  “Startup Weekend is as much about the power that is generated from the collaboration of such creative forces as it is about the formation of new companies.”  

Anderson did indicate that there were a number of viable ideas that came out of the weekend that warrant further consideration for TechColumbus venture development and company formation services. 

In addition to Startup Weekend Columbus 2, events were also held in Raleigh, Chicago and San Francisco.  Only San Francisco, with 23 companies, edged out Columbus in terms of promising ventures that made it through to Sunday.  Chicago produced six and Raleigh four.  

For more details on Startup Weekend Columbus 2 and the ventures formed, see:
 http://columbustech.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-happens-at-startup-weekend.html

http://columbustech.blogspot.com/2009/04/startup-weekend-columbus-ii-companies.html 

http://startupweekend.com/columbus/2009/04/06/its-a-wrap-for-swc2-and-swcii/