By Wayne Heilman
The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.)
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) All of the events at Colorado Springs Techstars Startup Week are organized into six tracks — adventure, collective impact, creative industry, growth, hack-a-thon, keynote and startup foundations.
Colorado Springs
Organizers have added events, attracted bigger-name speakers and added locations across the Colorado Springs area in a bid to attract up to 1,000 participants next month to the local Techstars Startup Week.
The Sept. 9-13 event begins with a presentation on “A Good Idea or a Great Opportunity” by Alice Loy, CEO of Creative Startups, a Santa Fe, N.M., nonprofit that has helped form accelerators for businesses in creative industries.
It ends with a closing party and competition for entrepreneurs who will vie for presenting the best investment pitch for their startup.
Peak Startup has scheduled 53 events for this year’s Startup Week, up from 45 last year and wants to triple the 300 entrepreneurs, vendors and others who attended last year’s Startup Week, said Natasha Main, executive director of the Colorado Springs-based nonprofit that is trying to build a local “ecosystem” to connect founders, innovators and investors.
“This is going to be the biggest Startup Week Colorado Springs has experienced,” Main said in a news release. “This year we are focusing on inclusivity, our unique tracks have been developed with community partners to highlight emerging industries such as sports tech in the adventure track, the importance of a creative economy to our culture of innovation, and how collaboration is a best practice across all sectors in the collective impact track.”
Other major events during startup week include a panel on sports startups, a kickoff party with speakers from five generations of startups, a hack-a-thon to come up with ideas to respond to growth, a startup and downtown office tour, a panel on transforming safety focusing on southeast Colorado Springs with a introduction by Gov. Jared Polis and a presentation on intellectual property by celebrity trademark lawyer William Wooten.
All events are organized into six tracks — adventure, collective impact, creative industry, growth, hack-a-thon, keynote and startup foundations.
For a full schedule and to register, go to peakstartup.org/cosstartupweek. Sponsors include the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs Utilities, the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC and the Downtown Partnership.
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