Startup Weekend piles up the goodies
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| Dawson King, CEO and founder of Cambridge Healthcare |
Ahead of the first ever event, which starts a week on Friday, the organisers have announced a trailer-load of new reasons to get involved, adding new prizes and awards and signing up genuinely world-class speakers, judges and mentors.
Adding significant depth to the prize pool is the opportunity to be coached by – and then pitch to – the Keiretsu Forum, the world’s largest angel investment network. The London branch of Keiretsu has agreed to offer a ‘special jury prize’ which gives the winning team the chance to pitch at its next angel investors’ meeting and also provide coaching to finesse both business plan and presentation in preparation.
According to its website, Keiretsu has over 850 members, who have invested over $260m into companies around the world since the organisation was set up in 2000.
Another headline development is the creation of a new award for healthcare innovations, sponsored and mentored by serial entrepreneur, Dawson King through his new venture, Cambridge Healthcare.
The organisers say: “This will challenge delegates to find new digital innovations in healthcare that can both improve quality for patients and efficiency for providers.
“Cambridge Healthcare will provide the winning team with industry funding introductions, best practice toolkits and access to NHS clinical expertise and key opinion leaders to help realise and execute their ideas after the Cambridge Startup Weekend.”
Founder and CEO of Cambridge Healthcare, King will also join the Startup Weekend juding panel, while the venture’s commercial director, Prof Alan Barrell will share wisdom built up during the course of 30 years working in healthcare, technology and business in a speech on the Sunday evening.
King said: “The Cambridge Startup Weekend is the perfect opportunity to bring together smart ideas with the mentoring and skills that can make them a reality. I’m looking forward to seeing the next generation of healthcare innovation in action at the event.”
Startup Weekends are organised in major cities around the world and are based on the idea that it might be both productive and fun to try to build a business over the course of an intensive weekend-long bootcamp.
While it is a recent addition to the Startup Weekend community, the Cambridge event broke new ground by becoming the first of them anywhere to allocate a cut of the proceeds to future entrepreneurial talent.
The organisers recognise that many of us don’t have 54 hour stamina and so have now released tickets just for the Sunday evening session, when the the final presentations take place and the prizes are handed out. Tickets cost £20 and can be booked through http://cambridge.startupweekend.org/tickets/
For the hardcore entrepreneur, Cambridge Startup Weekend says there will be space at the St John’s Innovation Centre for attendees to “unroll their sleeping bags and recharge their batteries over the course of the weekend” – they just need confirm that they require space when they book their tickets.
