The participants of Startup Weekend Phoenix will work on their companies at CO+HOOTS, a co-working space located on Seventh and Roosevelt streets, from Friday through Sunday, creating new products along with marketing and financial plans to go with them.
Startup Weekend Phoenix is a local event that is part of the global nonprofit organization Startup Weekend, which operates out of Seattle and has helped organize more than 150 startup weekends around the world since 2007. The Valley has previously hosted two other startup weekends—one in 2008 and one by ASU in early 2009, said Justin Talbot-Stern, one of the event’s organizers.
Talbot-Stern said he decided to help put together a Phoenix startup weekend after attending another event in San Francisco in July. There he found out that startup weekends are put on by local volunteers. When no one else in Phoenix stepped up to the plate, Talbot-Stern and other local entrepreneurs decided they would.
“We just make sure that the food is there, that the lights are on and everybody can get on the Internet,” he said. “Everything else is up to the teams themselves. How much time they want to put into it, how hard they want to work and everything, and it is spectacular how far some of those teams can go in just those 54 hours.”
Between five and 10 teams of three to 10 people will compete over the weekend. On Friday people will pitch their ideas, they will form into teams and work all Saturday and Sunday, and they will make five-minute presentations showcasing their products and marketing and financial plans on Sunday night.
“A company that has a fantastic idea and builds a product but didn’t do a sales plan probably isn’t going to win because you have to state balance,” he said. “Just like any business out there, you have to keep an eye on all aspects of your business.”
While all of the participants will be offered discounted work spaces at CO+HOOTS to encourage them to pursue their weekend innovations further, the winning team will also get meetings with local investors.
“There’s no monetary value, but to a startup, having access to those kind of people is far more important than having a couple of bucks in the bank,” he said. “They’re the people that can get you the money or help you grow to the next stage.”
Koustubha Deshpande, a computer science graduate student, said he’s been looking forward to attending a startup weekend since learning he’d missed the ASU event last year.
Deshpande, who is working on an application called DAWG that integrates users’ social networks and is expected to launch some time next month, said startup weekends are good events for entrepreneurs to meet.
“It’s a very good event for making new connections and meeting likeminded people like you who are passionate and want to do something new to change the world,” he said. “I’m willing to make good connections, good friends out of it and if some angel investors will be there I will be happy to talk to them.”
Michael Witham, a management senior, said he is starting a company called Chatroam.com which provides location-aware chat rooms and which is set to launch this month. He said he is attending Startup Weekend Phoenix to meet other people in the Valley who are also working on creative things.
Witham said Phoenix’s technology industry used to be dead but has begun emerging over the last few years.
“I really think that an idea like this could be really great for Phoenix because it can bring together the people who are interested in (the technology industry) and we can all meet in a centralized location and hopefully build relationships that will continue to grow once the weekend’s over with,” he said.
Witham said he was attracted to the industry because there are no startup costs—Chatroam.com has spent about $1,500, Witham said, and they now have a product that can be used by anyone on the planet.
“In no other industry can you do that,” he said. In the technology industry “there’s constant innovation, there’s room to grow and there’s new technologies that are just going to make it larger. I feel like it’s almost the gold rush of the 1800s where there’s a lot of opportunity.”
More and more people have begun going into the technology industry, Witham said, and with things like “The Social Network,” the industry is becoming less nerdy and more mainstream.
“I think it’s already a pretty sexy industry to be in,” he said. “A lot of people look up to it, like being a rock star.”
Contact the reporter at salvador.rodriguez@asu.edu
