When people ask me what’s going on in the tech community, I never hesitate to say, "There’s a lot of young entrepreneurship."
Between the Hogan Program at Chaminade and Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship and E-Business (PACE) at UH, there’s no shortage of cool new companies being hatched.
"Startup Weekend" Honolulu is one of the more exciting local developments focused on entrepreneurship. The brainchild of local entrepreneurs Dave Pascua (a software engineer) and Danielle Scherma (founder of Social Wahines, www.SocialWahines.com), the event is a no-talk, all-action, 54-hour affair where entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products and launch startups.
Beginning with Friday night pitches, the process moves on to brainstorming, business model creation, market validation and basic prototype creation. Startup Weekend culminates with Sunday night demonstrations and presentations.
Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurs. Whether you are looking for feedback on an idea, seeking a co-founder or searching for a team to help you execute, Startup Weekends are the perfect environment to test your ideas and take the first steps toward launching your own startup.
It’s not just local talent that is featured. Along with seasoned tech industry pros from Hawaii, judges are flown in from the mainland to mentor and evaluate participants.
Scherma says she and Pascua got acquainted with the Startup Weekend phenomenon on the mainland and "felt compelled to bring it to Hawaii." She said the events have grown from 60 to nearly 130 attendees. Her goal is nothing less than generating Startup Weekend events in Honolulu twice a year for five years and launching 200 local startups. She’s hoping it will inspire "our community of entrepreneurs, bring them together, create more jobs (and) put Hawaii on the map in the global startup community."
So far, the results have been promising.
One of the success stories she points to is that of Elyse Peterson, a participant in last year’s Startup Weekend event. Elyse labored on a tea farm in Japan for six months after graduating from UH and worked with a team at Startup Weekend to launch Tealet.com. One of the judges, flown in from Silicon Valley and the venture partner at 500 Startups, liked what she had to offer and accepted her into the company’s prestigious accelerator program. She left opening day of Startup Weekend and will be working on Tealet with Silicon Valley mentors for the next six months.
Startup Weekend is a long time coming. I can’t think of a better form of social alchemy to move our industry forward.
The next Startup Weekend will be held at the University of Hawaii on Nov. 16. You can ping them at pace@hawaii.edu.
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Mike Meyer, former Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, now manages IT for Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.
