While 15 companies emerged from the rubble of Red Bull cans during Baltimore’s recent Startup Weekend, the Seattle-based nonprofit Startup Weekend has its sights set higher.
Startup Weekend NEXT, announced yesterday, is “the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched,” says Steve Blank, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, and is taking charge of the new program. The goal? To create 10,000 new startup companies.
And they’re looking for local communities to host, just like the existing Startup Weekend model.
Watch a video about Startup Weekend NEXT.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEy-fWOLBFs&w=549&h=309]
Startup Weekend NEXT is markedly different from Startup Weekend, as the NEXT website explains:
NEXT is a 3-week in-person course that provides real world, hands-on learning about starting a scalable company. This is not a class about how to write a business plan, and it’s not an exercise that proves how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research library to size markets – and the end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation. [more]
NEXT is a collaboration among Startup Weekend, Techstars, Udacity and Startup America, according to Upstart Business Journal. To bring Startup Weekend Next to any city, including Baltimore, five things are required:
- An organizer
- A facilitator
- Mentors
- Coaches
- A total of 30 entrepreneurs
Startup Weekend NEXT kicks off in 25 cities starting Nov. 28.
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