How to Organize a Techstars Startup Weekend in Your City | Techstars

All the resources to help you learn more about Techstars Startup Weekend and how to become an organizer.
https://youtu.be/-q9Eed2eH8Y
Techstars Startup Weekend is a creative and collaborative three-day educational event where anyone can develop and pitch new startup ideas. It's about pitching, business model creation, prototyping, designing, and market validation, in a friendly and supportive team environment. All in just 54 hours.
Before you organize a Techstars Startup Weekend, it’s essential you have a clear understanding of our mission, values, and activities — to the community, potential sponsors and participants.
The mission of Techstars Startup Weekend is to teach and promote entrepreneurship and build, strengthen, and empower communities through experiential learning. Startup Weekend participants build diverse teams, work on their ideas and pitches, and collaborate with like-minded, innovative, driven, and passionate individuals.
We believe that the people who come to our event will be the ones to solve the real challenges our world faces. We put people first and are open to all. With that in mind, we have defined four values at the core of Techstars Startup Weekend.
We believe strong entrepreneurial ecosystems are created from connected communities. That’s why we create strong community bonds by facilitating connections and sharing our networks. This is the foundation for community transformation.
We help others whenever possible, giving first to our community, with no specific expectations of return. We believe that the pay-it-forward principle builds strong startup networks and communities.
We believe collaboration drives innovation. Our community leaders are an integral part of the Techstars Startup Weekend team. As a team, we act with integrity and treat others with respect.
Techstars Startup Weekend is always open to all. We’re committed to making people feel included and welcomed — before, during and after the weekend. We invite all communities to participate. We use inclusive language in communications and respect cultural differences. We lead with empathy and encourage inclusive behaviour that will nurture a safe and inclusive environment.
While each Startup Weekend is a little different, the following schedule gives a sense of what a typical three-day schedule will look like.
Day 1 - Meet, pitch, and form teams.
Day 2 - Build a minimum viable product and receive mentorship from local industry experts.
Day 3 - Complete work, give final pitch presentations, network, and celebrate!
Techstars Startup Weekend is always open to all, regardless of experience, background, skill set and abilities, and whether or not the participant has an idea to pitch.
https://youtu.be/K43KDs4C1aA
Whether you’re looking to build a startup community in your local city or are interested in developing as an entrepreneur yourself, organizing is a great way to get involved. You may decide to become an organizer to:
These videos give a peek into Startup Weekend over the years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjWZTc8Ith4
https://vimeo.com/215483944
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2RJjA68p3k
Being a Techstars Startup Weekend organizer is an incredibly rewarding experience, but it will take hard work, dedication, and a lot of your time. If you’re thinking about organizing a Techstars Startup Weekend, it’s important to make sure you’re ready to make the commitment.
https://youtu.be/paThhhTaaNs
We have a short list of requirements to ensure that our organizers maintain a high standard of quality across all events being run worldwide. This helps ensure all global participants have the same exceptional experience. Please review and agree to the following before applying to organize.
Taking part at the event or completing our online organizer training webinar will help set expectations and help you understand the highs and lows of a Startup Weekend. With that knowledge, you develop the empathy as an organizer to provide that experience to future participants. Register to watch "Becoming an Organizer: First Steps & Best Practices" here and complete the training course or find upcoming Techstars Startup Weekends to attend here.
We’ve created organizer rules and requirements for two key reasons. First, it ensures your goals are aligned with Techstars Startup Weekend’s mission. And second, by reviewing how we’ve run successful, impactful events, you too can run great outstanding community events.
A typical Techstars Startup Weekend takes around 3 months (2 months for Techstars Startup Weekend Online) for a team of 4 to 8 people to organize. Your team will be responsible for nearly all aspects of the event. You will raise sponsorship and sell tickets to cover event costs, secure a venue, hire a catering company, and find local mentors, judges, speaker(s) and volunteers. Your team will also promote the event and recruit participants.
You can’t do this alone. Thriving teams share the same passion and mission of supporting local entrepreneurs and driving positive change in their communities. We also find the best events have participants with diverse backgrounds, skill sets, and cultural perspectives. A good organizing team should represent the ideal demographics and skill ratio of the participants that they want to attract to the event. Finally, this takes a committed team that you trust will see the event through to the end.
We support thousands of events in countries all around the world, which means we’ve seen nearly every possible scenario. While we want your team to have freedom when running your events, these rules help Techstars provide a high level of quality and consistency for our events so that your team can provide the greatest value to participants.
The team should ideally consist of around four to eight members and have a lead organizer. It takes a lot of energy and commitment to create the Techstars Startup Weekend experience, and sharing this workload reduces the pressure on each organizer and ensu