The Shreveport Bossier Startup Weekend event will be held on Oct 26-28, 2012 inside of Shreveport’s coworking space Cohab. The Shreveport Bossier Startup Weekend will be host to dozens of entrepreneurs being coached by more than 30 successful business and industry leaders in the area. The list of committed judges and coaches is still growing.
Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event that provides everything you need to launch a startup. It is a global movement that has already hosted 57,000 entrepreneurs across 672 venues in 100 countries around the world in 2011. To date, those events have created 5,005 startups. The goal is to launch the entrepreneurs in attendance to success by teaching the basics of becoming a founder and finding the right venture.
Anyone is welcome to attend the event and pitch their idea and receive feedback. Teams then organically form to create what has the potential to be a successful business. The weekend has been described as a, “54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation.” The weekend ends with presentations for more critical feedback.
Organizers John Grindley, Rob Gaudet, and Jessica Schiele have been working long and hard to get this event off the ground because it is the first event of its kind to come to Shreveport Bossier. Part of the reason Gaudet is involved this year is because he placed second in the Alexandria Startup Weekend event back in June. Since then, he’s been moving his business forward full time.
Grindley said this was the year to kick off the Startup Weekend in Shreveport Bossier because of the strong community of entrepreneurs and tech workers that can really make something out of an event like this. The organizers are expecting many great ideas and hopefully new businesses to come out of the weekend. They are hoping to have between 75 and 100 participants and another 40 or 50 community and business leaders serving as speakers, mentors, and judges.
There is great potential with this Startup Weekend. Entrepreneurs could find a company, a co-founder, meet entirely new people, or learn a new skill. Grindley is excited about the possibilities. He said, “with the amazing people we have here in Shreveport-Bossier, just think of what 100 people working together for 54 hours can accomplish. We could see the next Apple come out of this Startup Weekend, the next Moonbot Studios, the next Twin Engine Labs. The possibilities are endless and incredibly exciting.”
The organizers are currently finalizing their list of speakers and have not yet released the information. However, a solid list of community and business leaders will most likely be in attendance to represent a cross-section of what is going on in the area, according to Grindley. Anyone interested in seeing who will be participating should keep an eye on our Startup Weekend website and Cohab’s Facebook page for updates.
Find out more about this new Startup Weekend location and view the schedule at shreveportbossier.startupweekend.org and register before September 26th, 2012 and get early bird pricing.