Today we announced that Techstars has acquired UP Global, which includes Startup Weekend and many other fantastic events and programs. Startup Weekend is my absolute favorite global event for entrepreneurship. If you’ve never been to one, you’re really missing out. At these events (there about 1,000 per year from Boulder to Mongolia to Chile to New Zealand), entrepreneurs and the community gather to build startups in 54 hours. It’s all fueled by an incredible global network of people on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals and communities through entrepreneurship.
Startup Weekend was quite literally born in my office at Techstars in 2007. During the first ever Techstars class, Andrew Hyde (an early Techstars employee) came into my office and told me about his idea for Startup Weekend. He said he had been inspired by the Techstars “startup summer” that he was witnessing, but wondered what it would be like to inspire others with something similar over the course of a weekend. My reaction was simply “go do it.” And boy, did he. Andrew organized that first Startup Weekend that same summer, right here in Boulder. All of the 10 companies in Techstars participated in the weekend and worked on something with the community called VoSnap. While that company never went anywhere, something important had happened. Many people were inspired to go do a startup of their own. Teams were formed that would last nearly a decade. Lawyers, accountants, programmers, designers – everyone showed up to contribute. It was an adrenaline fueled weekend of pizza, coding, and learning by doing that I will never forget. The end result was an expanded community of entrepreneurs here in Boulder, many of whom I still keep in touch with today.
A few years later, Andrew had scaled Startup Weekend into a global phenomenon. Events were happening all over the world. Andrew was literally flying to and organizing each one, fueled by the passion he had for people discovering their love of entrepreneurship. Ultimately, he decided this wasn’t scalable and the business was formalized. Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, and Franck Nouyrigat got involved and brought real structure and operating chops to the table. As CEO, Marc built Startup Weekend, and UP Global, into an important part of an emerging global startup community. Techstars remained involved informally – we hosted and attended events, promoted them, and ultimately funded many companies that emerged from these weekends through our accelerators and venture capital funds.
About six months ago, Marc and I were sitting around talking about the “journey” of an entrepreneur from discovery and love of startups through to accelerator, funding, and IPO or exit, and how this all plays into mentoring and giving back. It’s always been fairly obvious to us both that UP Global (through Startup Weekend, Startup Week, Startup Next, Startup Digest, and more) was inspiring and encouraging entrepreneurs to “get going”. Techstars was helping the ones that were building businesses by growing their networks, providing intense mentorship, attracting seed capital, and scaling up through additional funding. It suddenly felt like it was the right time to join forces because we had built such complementary portions of highway along this “entrepreneurial journey”. We looked at each other across the room and basically said “you complete me”.
While we plan to continue to grow their footprint and reach, Techstars will leave Startup Weekend and these other assets largely untouched, and they will not be branded as “Techstars.” Marc Nager will remain in charge of these programs and become our Chief of Community. Along with Marc, we are 100% committed to keeping them open, community based, and global. Effective immediately, fees previously associated with Startup Next have been eliminated – enabling more entrepreneurs to take advantage of that resource to help them prepare to scale. But don’t expect many more changes except for us to try to broaden access to what already exists. These programs are magical as they are. We can now simply provide a “continuation” for some startups emerging from them and provide access to capital and additional network when appropriate.
I’m excited to work with Marc, Andrew, and the amazing people of UP Global to continue to work towards our combined vision of creating the world’s first truly global ecosystem for entrepreneurs to enable them to bring new technologies to market. I hope to see you soon at an upcoming event.
If you have questions or concerns about TS+UP, please reach out to me directly or visit http://www.whatsup.community/ for FAQs and more information.
