What every aspiring & early founder needs to know — A preview of our Ideas Track
This is a glimpse at one of six tracks we’re filling with workshops, panels, and other sessions at Boston Startup Week, September 18th-22nd. To see the full schedule, sign up for our newsletter so we can let you know when it’s announced.
Everyone in the startup community understands that ideas are only a starting point. But they are where almost every successful startup, and certainly where the vast majority of new founders, starts. So how do you go from brainstorm to business? Our Ideas Track is filled with sessions focused on giving founders the skills & best approaches to evaluate, validate, and make their ideas a reality.
We’ll have sessions for:
- Aspiring founders who want to learn the best way to get started, how to build a team, where to find customers, and what mistakes to avoid.
- Early-stage entrepreneurs that need help. Learn about the common things early startups get blocked by, and how to move past them. Hear about the processes you can use to make sure you’re on the right path.
- Anyone wondering if they have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. What do you need to know? How do you start? How can you try it out without risking your career / your reputation / your family’s livelihood?
For instance, one of the classic questions for aspiring founders with an idea for an app / tech-enabled business is how to get started if they don’t know how to code themselves. How do you find a tech co-founder? Is there any other way? And so we’ve assembled a panel packed with expertise:
Finding Tech Co-founders & Beyond: Options for Non-coding Founders
On this panel, we have:
- Serial entrepreneur Ellen Rubin, now Co-founder & CEO of ClearSky Data, the second startup Ellen has co-founded in her extensive career. Her former startup raised $15.4 million and was acquired by Verizon.
- Investor, founder, and former dev-shop Managing Partner, Cort Johnson. Cort has seen & helped countless founders find the technical assistance they need, and continues to do so at local cyber-security investor/incubator Hack Secure.
- Philip Greenwald, a Harvard i-Lab Asst. Director, former technical cofounder, and CEO of Code Undercover, a coding-bootcamp alternative that teaches founders to code by building their own ideas
- Reed Sturtevant, now General Partner at MIT’s The Engine accelerator & former Managing Director of TechStars Boston; Reed brings not only half a decade’s worth of investor experience seeing founder teams formed, but has been the technical cofounder at startups before that.
If you’re thinking about founding a startup but don’t have all the skills you need, come join our moderator Lauren Creedon in asking these experts about things like where to find a cofounder, how to get the money you need to pay for technical talent, and what you actually need to learn about tech yourself.
And that’s just one example.
It doesn’t take special magic or a specific background to start a startup. No one starts with all the skills & knowledge they need. If you want to build a business around your passion, to solve a problem you care about, or are simply the kind of person who wants to make an impact on the world and get the knowledge you need to do it, we’ll have a session for you in this track.
And just as importantly, Boston Startup Week will be an invaluable experience to meet your peers & mentors who can support you. So don’t miss this! Sign up for our newsletter so we can let you know when all the sessions are announced, and help us spread the word with a like on Facebook! We’ll see you in September!
