Startup Weekend: The Next Generation

For the last two years I’ve been co-organizing the first three Startup Weekend events with Stephanie Shuster (@stephshuster) and Tammy Hwang (@tammyhwang), with Ash Ayyaswamy (@ayyaswa) joining the team for Startup Weeeknd Hamilton 2 and 3. It’s been an awesome experience watching relationships form at these events, and watching teams like Nervu and WalkBug go on to compete in Lion’s Lair. Startup Weekend plays an important connective, motivational, educational and even company creation role in the community for startup rookies and veterans alike. My favourite thing of all was watching the collective experience of the community grow from the first event to the most recent.

All that said, Startup Weekend has a policy of having organizers continually hand off the event to others roughly every 3 events or so. The policy makes a lot of sense, I’ve been treating the book Startup Communities by Brad Feld as a bit of a Bible for community organizing, and one suggestion is to, “nurture new leaders, hand off existing activities to them, and take on new activities yourself and hand those over”. New people means fresh approaches to things and the development of more event organizers in the community.

It’s important to us to see Startup Weekend continue to play the role that it’s playing in Hamilton, so expect myself and other organizers to stay on as “mentors” for Startup Weekend Hamilton 4 to ensure all goes well. But we’re looking for a kick ass team to take over as organizers for the event going forward. If you’re interested in becoming a Startup Weekend co-organizer e-mail me at kevin@kevinbrowne.ca, let us know about yourself, and we’ll get back to you over the summer!