If you’ve been to a MergeLane Demo Day, you know it’s a whole different kind of startup event. If you haven’t, last year featured not only pitches from our dynamic, talented cohort of startups, all with at least one woman in leadership. We also had a sweet drumline, a killer ballet-meets-Aerosmith dance homage to our sponsors and a wonderful display of leadership from the kids joining us for “Take your Daughter (or Son) to Demo Day.”
It’s going to be another great celebration of leadership and innovation this year, and we want you to be there with us.
We look forward again to packing the Boulder Theater for an inspiring event on May 4th at 10am. We welcome you, your “other”, friends and associates who will love this as much as you will, and your kids above six years old.
Visit with founders, mentors, and investors from Boulder and around the nation who have chosen, like you, to support MergeLane's mission and to #changetheratio.
This event will sell out, so please reserve your tickets today.
Don’t wait, register for Demo Day now.Monday, May 15th @ Boomtown -9am-11am
Mission of the panel discussion: to explore how Boulder can influence the integration of health and balance into a new era of business/ entrepreneurship, and how by doing so a more innovative and successful society is born.
Additional Topics for discussion/ Q&A (Optional):
Health products
Physical & Mental Well being
Balanced Lifestyle
Workaholic and impact on health
Diet’s impact
Artificial intelligence is taking over the world of advertising. We’re seeing changes in every segment of marketing, from data insights to creative production and delivery. How will AdTech professionals survive and thrive in a world where algorithms are doing more thinking for us than they ever have before? Our panel of leaders will set out to explore the industry shift and what it means for the future of advertising.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often shrouded in mystery as an online unicorn or juju practice, and few know the spells but many claim to be “experts”. However, SEO isn’t magic: provide users with a good experience and you’ll earn customers. But if it’s that simple, why don’t more brands earn better search engine rankings? Join Alejandro Jauregui to learn how SEO best practices can influence brands’ digital marketing efforts throughout the customer life cycle. He will provide actionable insights to improve brands online performance in their journey to reach, capture and retain customers and beat the competition no matter the size.
We’ll be talking with leaders of some of the area’s most creative brands about their experiences creating under pressure and the tools they use to stay inspired and move through blocks. Founders from Topo, Base Coat / svperordinary, Miette et Chocolat, Angry Bovine and Dram Apothecary will present Pecha-Kucha style about how to stay Unstuck & Inspired, moving into a Q+A panel discussion on creating under pressure, maintaining the creative edge and reframing problems to get to innovation.
It's Boulder Startup Week and we're bringing back our noteworthy Hack the Dot. A Hack the Dot is a two-hour hackathon where coding school students, junior developers, experienced developers, marketers, designers and curious web people come together to build ideas around a domain name. Our events are meant to be a quick and fun way to build a humorous (and functional) product quickly while meeting people in your tech/startup community.
There will be pizza. And probably beer.
What to Bring / How to Prepare:
• Bring your laptop (fully charged). Bring your charger just in case.
Optional:
• Install the Atom text editor. Go here: https://atom.io/
• Setup a github.com account
How does it work?
Step 1: Attendees are broken up into random teams.
Step 2: The teams are provided with the same undisclosed domain name by Name.com, arbitrary and often hilarious.
Step 3: Teams have just two hours to come up with a functioning site inspired by that domain. The team builds the most creative and fun idea for the domain wins.
Participants will be judged on four criteria: (1) functionality, (2) design, (3) humor, and (4) creative domain name interpretation.
What do you get at the event?
FOOD!
SWAG!
FRIENDS!
How much does it cost?
It’s FREE!
Questions? Send them to HacktheDot@name.com.
REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hack-the-dot-galvanize-boulder-startup-week-2017-tickets-34119609671Tuesday, May 16th @ 1% Pledge - 9am - 11am
Startup: ēdn
RF Design: RF Response
Product Design: BES
Cloud Services: Telit
It’s a maddeningly pervasive system, one which affects all of us. Did you know that more trades are done over programmatic systems every day than the NYSE does in a year? IN. A. F$%&ING. YEAR. The system is colossal, but it’s not too complex to understand, we promise. You’ll walk away ready to wield Programmatic as any knight could wield knows his sword.
We believe that creativity and empathy are our greatest tools when tackling big, complex problems. That's why in April EchoUser and SHYFTco hosted a joint Diversity Lab (dLab) & day-long design sprint to "hack" diversity in tech with 9 startups (Sparkfun, Brandzooka, Turing Center, Full Contact, Techstars, Tendril, VictorOps, MojoTech and IMM).
WHAT TO EXPECT
In this talk, we'll share the results of our "Diversity Lab & Mastermind" experiment with the Boulder community. We'll dig into and discuss how startups can use design thinking methods to make progress on more than product design but also systems, environments, and ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable problems--like Culture and Diversity work in their companies.
COMMUNITY IS KEY:
A big part of the Diversity Lab was also about building a community for people who are working to improve diversity & culture in their companies. This BSW event is also about connecting dots and helping YOU to join a stronger network of folks in D&I.
Changing consumer values, attitudes and behaviors are disrupting the food world and creating new opportunities for food and technology entrepreneurs focused on health, wellness, transparency, personalization, and creating and supporting a regenerative supply chain. This fast-paced, data-packed session will highlight the consumer trends shaping these new opportunities and provide inspiration and the start of a roadmap for how you can begin to seize them.
To pre-game the Startup Crawl, lets dig into best practices for telling your startup’s story while avoiding jargony marketing buzzwords – think innovative, bleeding-edge, disruptive. C’mon people – marketers are wordsmiths. We can do better!
During this networking event, meet and mingle with fellow marketers who face the same challenges and are tired of the same old buzzword bull$h!t.
Join us for an interactive session to increase "Innovation + Impact" for our community. At this Open House event you’ll have the opportunity to connect with people across sectors and discover ways to make a difference in your own backyard.
Our goal for the community showcase is to advance the knowledge and integration of corporate social responsibility and impact in our community. By attending and hearing stories of impact in our community, we will increase our local knowledge. We will ask selected companies to present their largest roadblock to advancing their impact. We hope that other members across the community will be able to help remove blockers and amplify successes. We will work in small teams to try and address cross-sector roadblocks to increasing our impact.
Finally, we will take one or two actions items away from the meeting to share at community pitch night and execute in the coming year.
If you want to present your story of community Impact + Innovation, please let us know by completing this form. Attendees and presenters will be facilitated from 3 - 5pm in the Boulder Theater by Greg Berry and Ryan Martens. This and the evening pitch competition is being made possible by a gift from Foundry Group and Techstars. It is supported by Pledge1%Colorado and the Colorado B Corp Community.
Recognizing Innovation and Celebrating Impact in Our Community
Pledge 1% Colorado, Techstars, Foundry Group, the Community Foundation Boulder County and the community of Colorado Certified B Corporations are excited to host an inaugural Pledge 1% Pitch Contest as a part of Boulder Startup Week. The Pitch Contest, through an interactive and fun event, seeks to recognize and support entrepreneurial and innovative nonprofit ideas to solve pressing problems and critical issues facing Boulder County.
Speakers and judges include:
$10K will be awarded to the winner selected by a panel of judges and audience votes. Throughout the night we’ll be highlighting inspirational stories of how startups are positively impacting community.
Tentative Agenda:
6:30pm - Doors Open, 7:00pm - Show Starts
Wednesday, May 17th @ Galvanize - 9am - 11am
Establishing Your Digital Path to Predictable Revenue:
Beau frequently reiterates to clients that marketing is a blend of art and science. In this session, he will guide you along his process pairing marketing philosophy with marketing practice vetted by $35M of ad spend over the last year. He will then walk you through his digital marketing playbook that brought 20:1 ROI results with real world examples. The intent of this session is for each attendee to walk away with an actionable and practical path to success in their digital marketing efforts.
If you’re feeling like every day brings some radical new data tool or content placement need or targeting capability, you’re not alone. Digital media trends are shifting creative beneath our feet. It’s a crazy space right now, and we found qualified professionals who are just crazy enough to explain it.
This panel will delve into what the never-ending improvements in AdTech mean for creative teams everywhere. They’ll discuss how they’re reacting to what’s happening right now and how they’re preparing for what’s coming next.
We’re sliding straight into this event out of the ‘AdTech Gets Creative’ panel, so you know it’ll be one phenomenal opportunity to meet and greet brilliant minds throughout the industry.
We aren’t going to sugar-coat this. Being an entrepreneur and part of a startup is a roller coaster ride with exhilarating highs and breath-taking (*occasionally terrifying) lows. It definitely isn’t for the feint of heart.
One word keeps coming up: GRIT. You have to have it to survive. You’re going to hear a lot of no’s and hit a healthy share of roadblocks that test your creativity and resolve. That’s a given. It also prompts the question: “Does this startup life have to be SO hard?“ Where can we also find GRACE? Along with grit, thriving comes down to living in the flow, sidestepping the low-lows, finding balance where we can, and channeling our strengths to increase the odds of success.
We are bringing together 6 powerhouse entrepreneurs from across the spectrum of startup-land to share their truth as they know it about entrepreneurship + grit + grace.
6 MINUTE SPOTLIGHT:
They’ll each have 6 minutes to share a their juicy insights and story on what they have learned in the trenches. Join us to hear how they keep pushing, inventing, growing & thriving.
Then we’ll dive into an all-hands panel with our speakers for a hearty, fast-moving Q&A round.
6pm: NETWORKING
6:45pm: TED-style presentations:
7:20-8pm: PANEL
Our very own BiFR co-organizer, Dan Grollman will be giving a lecture introducing the field of Human-Robot Interaction.
Dan is the Robot Brain Architect at Sphero. He received his undergrad in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Yale University and a SC.M and a PhD from Brown University focusing on Human-Robot Interaction and Machine Learning.
Note: Please also sign up for the Meetup here to help the organizers: https://www.meetup.com/BoulderIsForRobots/events/239362156/
Often, startups get off the ground with technology or a product that solves a problem, which answers the "HOW" portion of why they exist.
But for a startup brand, that answer is just a piece of the puzzle.
Are you a startup with a “HOW,” but not yet a “WHY”? Why exactly are you the right business to solve this problem? Why should investors and employees and customers choose you? Are you building an actionable brand story or simply hanging out a shingle with your logo attached?
Join some of best brand-builders in Boulder as they:
Define what we mean by “finding your WHY”
Diagnose what’s missing in your current brand of “how” and the critical elements to watch out for
Demonstrate the business impact of finding your WHY with real world case studies
Deliver actionable takeaways and processes to uncover your “WHY” as soon as you leave
Looking for a job or an in with a startup company in Boulder? This is a great opportunity to meet with 15 + local companies looking for great talent.
Participating companies:
Zayo
10-4
Applied Trust
Brandzooka
BSW Wealth Partners
City of Boulder
Code Craft
CU
Gloo
Matter Communications
name.com
Occipital
Sphero
The Trade Desk
UpRamp
Sonotize
Gaia
*If you're a Boulder-based business and would like to participate in the job fair, please email rendl@boulderstartupweek.com if you have 5+ positions open.
What does it look like to create a culture that’s authentically values-led?
CampMinder was born from the values its team members learned at summer camp: things like Put Team First, Get It Done, Find A Better Way, Be Admirable, and Give Joy. Now CampMinder team members serve the industry that taught them these values by living these values.
In this session, you’ll hear from CampMinder’s Founder and CEO, Dan Konigsberg, about how this bootstrapped SaaS company – led by its values – blends heart, wisdom, and technology to help camps succeed. CampMinder’s Director of Talent & Culture, Analiese Brown, will share additional insights and ideas for incorporating a values-led approach to talent management.
Whether you’re a job-seeker who’s curious about working for an authentically values-led company or a founder interested in building a strong company culture, you’ll find inspiration in the story of CampMinder, a culture inspired by its summer camp roots.
Ignite Boulder 32!
What is Ignite?
Ignite is a night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. It is a worldwide movement, and Boulder is hosting our thirty-second on Thursday, May 18th at 7pm (6pm doors) at the Boulder Theater.
The event runs till 9pm.
It is a 21+ event - you can buy beer at the show. Under 21 are welcome with a parent.
We are a volunteer run geek event that puts on some pretty fresh events. Ticketing is paperless, just come to the theater with your ID. When the tickets are gone, they are really, really gone. So since you're here, you should buy one.
BUY TICKETS
Timeline:
April 19th at 10am: Tickets on sale!
April ???: Tickets sell out. Every Ignite Boulder has sold out. All of them. Please, please, please don't wait until the last minute to buy tickets if you know you are coming. If you wait to buy, you'll miss out. Every time someone tweets about missing the deadline - Justin Beiber gets one step closer to doing a Boulder show.
May 18th : Ignite, Ignite, Ignite! Show up at 6 with your entire group, get good seats, and socialize with other witty and amusing individuals from the community.
What is it like?
The talks are funny, interesting, nerdy, quick and from the heart. Here is an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyydlDsS5I
Anything else?
People tend to go out afterward (especially the speakers), so pencil that in on your calendar as well.
Calling all beer geeks! Come test your knowledge of all things craft beer, and brewing. Teams will be limited to six (6) people maximum per team. Prizes will be awarded to the top two teams. Want to know more about the world of craft beer, and homebrewing? Download the Brew Guru app: https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/brew-guru/
It’s that time again. Time to pack the house and celebrate the spirit and creativity of entrepreneurship.
We’re thrilled to be the closing event of 2017 Boulder Startup Week. We invite you to come and cheer on 10 Boomtown startups as they give you an inside look into what they’ve been building over the past few months.