San Diego Startup Week begins at noon today with a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of iHive, a shared workspace and CyberTech “Internet of Things” incubator, and an afternoon pitchfest intended to highlight San Diego’s prowess in startups, art, and music.
San Diego’s second annual Startup Week includes scheduled events, a downtown “startup crawl,” entrepreneur “speed mentoring” sessions, workshops, panel discussions, and parties intended to showcase a cross-section of San Diego’s creative class and the innovation economy.
Startup Week activities take a breather Thursday morning to make room for a separate-but-related event, the San Diego Venture Group’s half-day Venture Summit. Startup Week events resume Thursday afternoon, and are focused Friday at an all-day session in the new downtown San Diego Central Public Library, and include a keynote talk by Timothy “Scott” Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership.
In the three years he has served as CEO of the Startup America Partnership (which merged earlier this year with Up Global, the Seattle nonprofit supporting the Startup Week network), Case said he has visited more than a hundred American cities and held countless discussions about the key ingredients needed to build a startup community.
“People get hung up on capital,” Case said by phone last night from his home in Connecticut. But more important than raising funding is what Case calls the “density of relationships.” It’s not about a physical density within a particular startup ecosystem, but rather how well entrepreneurs and other local innovation leaders can use their own networks to make key connections.
“It’s almost always the driving force,” Case said. Networking can overcome a lack of venture capital by using relationships to bring in capital and other resources from startup communities around the globe, Case said.
Case said he also plans to meet with the leaders of San Diego’s startup community. “Part of my personal mission is to help cities like San Diego develop their high-growth startup communities,” Case explained. A complete schedule of events is here. Highlights of the events planned for San Diego Startup Week include:
Tuesday June 17
—Noon: San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and other civic and business leaders will mark the opening of the CyberTech “Internet of Things” downtown incubator and shared workspace iHive, followed by a pitchfest intermingled with art and music.
—7 pm: San Diego Startup Week Opening Ceremony Bash, billed as “a chance to take a break from the grind and celebrate what we have accomplished as a community,” with craft
