Event Recap: Startup Weekend Summit & StartupCamp L.A.

Event Recap: Startup Weekend Summit & StartupCamp L.A.

I just got back from a week of travel; first to Kansas City for Startup Weekend organizer’s summit, and then to Los Angeles for Startup Camp 2 – Communications Edition.  We hit the road regularly to catch up with entrepreneurs, customers, and the creative people building the next generation of communications apps.

Startup Weekend Organizers Summit

The event took place in Kansas City, MO where the Kauffman Foundation, which recently provided a large grant to be used for the expansion of Startup Weekend, is based.

In case you haven’t heard of it before, let me give you the rundown on what Startup Weekend is.  You show up on Friday night to pitch startup ideas, teams form, hack all day Saturday and most of Sunday and then pitch/demo on Sunday night.  The event is a great introduction to building startups, and gives budding entrepreneurs the opportunity to test out the role.  Some people see it as a startup factory, but what it really generates are new batches of entrepreneurs ready to build their first companies.  As a sponsor of the event, we provide Twilio credit and development help to teams looking build a communications component in their products.

Startup Camp 2 at ITEXPO

Following weeks of promotions, and a much higher submission count than was expected, the four finalists were selecteded to present their startups at the upcoming StartupCamp Communications event being held in Los Angeles in early October.

GroupMe, a Twilio-powered company, was among those included to present their group text messaging application.  In addition to this event, we spoke on panels in the Cloud Communications Summit discussing the future of VoIP, impact of cloud communications on the enterprise, and many other industry topics.

On Tuesday night I headed to Santa Monica for a local tech event, where venture capitalist Mark Suster spoke about how Los Angeles can foster more growth and innovation in the city and attract more entpreneurs to the area.  We’re looking forward to coming back for Startup Weekend Los Angeles in a couple weeks to help with this.

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Are you travelling to San Francisco?  Let us know, we’d be happy to host you here at our offices.  Keep tabs on where you’ll find member of the Twilio team next, and when we’ll be coming to your city, through our events calendar.  See you soon!