Startup Weekend: Santa Clarita
If you’re going to host the hottest event in the tech world and the biggest event in your city’s tech history, where would you have it? A recently vacated bikini shop directly in front of the Westfield Town Center Mall, right?
Startup Weekend is a global foundation with a mission of helping startups launch great companies quickly all over the world from Boston, Kenya, Bosnia, and Tel Aviv. Events happen all over the world and there’s a good chance there’s one right now…somewhere. We brought this amazing global program to Santa Clarita. With the support of our great friends at Westfield, we took over retail space at the base of the famous Westfield Mall on Town Center Drive in a bikini shop. Entrepreneurs, designers, and programmers got together on Friday night to pitch ideas for companies. The voting began and the best 8 ideas were selected. Everyone joins one of the ideas (a seed for a company) and they immediately begin working on creating the company and product. Work continues all night and sometimes virtually non-stop until Sunday evening where a judging panel picks the Top 3. Our winning team received a 4-hour sit down meeting with the great Clearstone Ventures.
Judging support by the crowd of onlookers watching the event live outside our doors, it was a monster success for the Santa Clarita Startup Community.
Here’s the video from the party, errr I mean event…
The Recap
“Fantastic event for the Santa Clarita Community. Read the Signal Article.”
“Phenomenal! Erick Arndt of Timeshare Juice and SCV MeetUp and Jim Armstrong of Clearstone Venture Partners put on a fantastic event with Brad Feld of Foundry Group and TechStars fame. No VC or male ego here. Brad is intelligent, insightful and passionate about entrepreneurs. His advice was a simple, constructive narrative from years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor. While we hear other Angel/VC’s advise us NOT to love our product – completely ass backwards for product creators – Brad preaches the opposite – LOVE your product and nurture the hell out of it and the money will come. I’m excited to be a part of the SCV Startup community!”
“What a great presentation! Very insightful and motivating! Amazing that a speaker of this caliber gave a talk in Santa Clarita!”
“Awesome insight from Brad! Not just a cheerleader speech but actual advice on what makes or breaks a startup idea. Emphasized the importance of community (SCV) and obsession for what you do. Very inspiring. And complementary sushi + wine to follow? If this event had any more class it would require a fancy hat for entrance.”
“Very informative and a great networking opportunity. Love the idea of a start-up community here in SCV. Thank you to all who were involved.”
“The part where Brad leaped over the building in a single bound was particularly impressive.”