Startup Weekend

Louisville’s ninth startup weekend was held at Bellarmine College on October 14-16, 2016.

I volunteered this time around, spending most of Friday at the check-in table to help welcome and orient people as they came in. It gave me a chance to see friends as they arrived, and meet a lot of new people.

This was our largest event ever, with 80 some-odd people. A little over half of them pitched their one-minute idea, and eleven of those ideas were upvoted into teams.

The teams spent all weekend (54 hours from start to finish), with top-notch mentors. On Sunday evening, starting at 5:00, the teams each gave a 5-minute (ish) presentation on their idea, research, prototype, and business model.

The three judges were Fred Durham (CafePress), Grace Simrall (city of Louisville’s Chief of Civic Innovation), and Chris Bailey (Revio).

The Winners

The three winning teams were:

1. UpNext, a phone app to make karaoke easier
2. CritterFacts, daily texts about animals
3. Touchband, a social media wristband

Other entrants were: Samurai School, Buy Spy, Ring of Fire, Glass Capitol, Bocca de Lupo, Book Club, JamFit, and News Lancing.

Around the Web

Here are other looks at the event:

• Blackstone Media’s blog post
• Kizan’s blog post, from Jonathan Vanderford, from the winning team UpNext
• Insider Louisville’s news article
• My blog post as a participant in the event earlier this year
• And my followup post about our competition in the Venture Sharks

Here are some other events coming up:

• 11/17, Louisville’s first 5 Across (5:00PM, $5.00, 5 pitches, 5 minutes, $500 prize)
• 12/1, The monthly Inventor’s Council meeting
• 12/3, Local Hack, a day of worldwide hacking

And here are some resources for the local startup scene:

• StartupLou, especially the Resources page
• Greg Langdon’s resources page
• Nucleus LaunchIt program
• Metro Startup Launcher