Startup Weekend, the create-a-company cram session that has spread worldwide in just a few years, is branching out in a big way. The Seattle-based nonprofit tells Xconomy it is creating a sister organization called the Startup Foundation, aimed at establishing a permanent hub for local entrepreneurial communities around the globe. The new project has backing from the Kauffman Foundation, and full-time staffers in seven cities who officially start work next month.
Startup Weekend CEO Marc Nager says the Startup Foundation is a natural outgrowth of the Startup Weekend phenomenon, which gives entrepreneurs 54 hours to organize themselves into teams and develop proto-companies that are ready to pitch investors for possible seed money. The nonprofit organization, headquartered in Seattle, has taken its events to nearly 200 cities in 65 countries since 2009, and is on pace to hold 200 Startup Weekends this year alone.
Nager and Startup Weekend CTO Franck Nouyrigat say that all those entrepreneurial bootcamps have shown that, while there are motivated entrepreneurs everywhere, there’s often not enough community infrastructure to keep momentum going after the weekend is over. Instead, the scene tends to be somewhat fragmented—held together by several key players, but not always fully united. “The startup community in general doesn’t really have that much of a voice,” Nager says.
The Startup Foundation hopes to grow that voice by building each city’s organization from the bottom up. The Foundation “fellow” in each city will start by conducting a high-level study of the entrepreneurial community: Identifying the institutional and individual players, surveying influential community members, and compiling a list of the area’s strengths and weaknesses.
That leads to a big summit, in which members of the entrepreneurial community vote to elect an advisory board of leading people to help guide the Foundation’s work. They also come up with recommendations for what the Foundation should pursue—improving outreach with government, building stronger ties to university students, training developers, reaching out to the media, and so on. The local staffer is then charged with raising money in their area to fund those activities, and making them happen.
The first wave of Foundation cities, starting work July 1, will be Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Des Moines, IA, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Seattle, the effort will be led by Jennifer Cabala, the former Seattle 2.0 CEO who is currently Startup Weekend’s chief marketing officer.
“The greatest validation is, we started having these conversations two moths ago with all the seven people, and they all said ‘Great idea,'” Nager says. “And we came back two months later and offered
