Back in December 2012, I read the book Startup Communities by Brad Feld. I felt inspired by what the Boulder startup community was doing, what they’ve accomplished over the past years and how connected they were. The Boulder startup ecosystem is populated by different initiatives and players, but for me, one of the most interesting initiatives is the Boulder Startup Week, a 5-day event that showcases the unique startup culture of Boulder.

I immediately thought about organizing something similar in Porto, a Porto Startup Week, but then when talking with some friends we decided to make it bigger and have events going on in 6 cities in the North and Center of Portugal and call it OPO Startup Week in honor of the airport that serves the region.

What was a dream of a small group of people, start growing and last week we had more than 40 events, in 6 cities, more than 40 organizations working together to make this happen and thousands of people directly or indirectly engaged. In a 8-day event we were able to celebrate our startup community and we set the foundation for future initiatives and events.

It was 100% distributed, 100% volunteer, 99% free!!

While we are happy with the outcome of this first OPO Startup Week, not everything was great: we weren’t able to engage as many people as we wanted, we weren’t able to be featured on mainstream media and we didn’t have the impact we were expecting to have. However,we know, it takes 40 years to build a mature startup ecosystem, so we have lots of work ahead of us.

Finally I would like to mention the amazing work of a group of 5 people that made this possible: André Magalhães, Tiago Sequeira, Alexandre Mendes, Pedro Paupério and Roberto Machado. Together we were the first group of co-conspirators and co-dreamers and we were able to engage more and more people and organizations.

Here’s to the crazy ones!!