6th Annual Boulder Start-Up Week

“It started here but there are 150 cities around the world that also do start up weeks now because of what Boulder did.”

6 years ago Andrew Hyde had a vision to create a forum where entrepreneurs and those with business ideas could come together and learn from each other.

“I really wanted to create an entrepreneurial conference that I loved.  A lot of times at conferences – you pay a lot of money to go to a hotel ballroom and listen to people that have paid to take the stage and that’s not how we work, entrepreneurs are just more creative and different.”

Boulder Start Up Week has now grown to an event that has 200 events all around town from Gunbarrel to South Boulder and has now grown internationally. “It started here but there are 150 cities around the world that also do start up weeks now because of what Boulder did.  Amman, Jordan just had their first one last week, we’ve got them in Australia and New Zealand – all over.”

Andrew Hyde says that this is not just a conference for tech entrepreneurs, but for anyone with an idea and passion.  “My definition of a start-up is a project with passion, so we’ve got food entrepreneurs, we have people who own coffee shops participating, we have people who operate dispensaries, just all over the board.”

Boulder Start Up Week has two main goals “to connect people and to realize that Boulder is a very open and honest community about entrepreneurship.  So several of the talks are about failure, several of the talks are about mindfulness and growth and several of the talks are about funding.  So really the goal is to make sure everybody knows that that’s there.  The second big part is just to know that this is a hard thing to do, being an entrepreneur is not easy and doing it alone is not something you should do, so making sure people know that there is other people going through exactly the same journey that they are is really important to us.”

Boulder Start Up Week runs May 16-20.  Events are generally about an hour and are free and open to the public, but registration is required. Find out more about the schedule and register at boulder.startupweek.co.