February 3rd

• Startup Weekend & Tech Cocktail Compete To Recruit Startups For Startup America

• How to Start A New Business in Less Than 50 Hours

• Startup Weekend Announces Global Education Partnership with Pearson

• Startup Weekend success story’s idea nearly swiped

The full article on the announcement can be found on the TechCrunch website.

Read our (previously published) interview with the Rumgr team here.

A Startup Story…

After graduating from the TechStars program in Boulder, CO, in 2009, SendGrid has grown its team to over 70 employees (as of Jan 2012) and sends billions of emails every month for tens of thousands of customers, including Foursquare, Hootsuite, Pinterist, Spotify and others. All along, SendGrid has been helpful to its fellow startups. And now, through their support of Startup Weekend, they plan to extend that helping hand even further.

So, what is SendGrid?

SendGrid is a cloud-based email infrastructure service. They help companies improve their customer communications by increasing email deliverability, reporting email metrics, offering dynamic scalability and providing tools for flexible and custom email integrations.

SendGrid makes it easy for developers to add email-based features into their applications. Integration is quick and simple via SMTP or API. Whether you’re sending transactional emails (automated welcome messages, notifications, password reminders) or a newsletter to announce a launch or feature release, SendGrid can help. They even have an API that lets your app accept email from your users, so you can create deeper engagement and a richer customer experience while utilizing the simplicity and universal familiarity of email.

SendGrid allows your team to focus on your product and your strengths, while they make sure the email keeps on flowin’.

A Special offer from SendGrid to all Startup Weekenders

As part of their global sponsorship, SendGrid will help the Startup Weekend community even further by offering their Bronze plan for free for 3 months to all Startup Weekend attendees in 2012.

Startup Weekend is very happy to welcome SendGrid as our newest Global Sponsor!  We look forward to leveraging our common interests to continue building and educating startup communities around the world.

“We love Startup Weekend for the opportunities it provides to aspiring entrepreneurs and the community it builds throughout the world. We’re glad that our service can help startups succeed by making it easy and affordable for developers to build email into their apps. Through our global sponsorship in 2012, we’ll be more involved than ever in the worldwide startup magic that is Startup Weekend…which is awesome.” - Tim Falls, Community Guy @SendGrid

“We are extremely excited to have SendGrid on board as a global sponsor; they understand the challenges startups face.  SendGrid has already supported Startup Weekend events in dozens of cities around the world and we’re very happy to work with them to support entrepreneurs at all of our events this year!” - Joey Pomerenke, Chief Marketing Officer @StartupWeekend

Click here for more information about SendGrid.

If your early-stage tech startup has interesting or disruptive product and strong growth potential, HATCH is for you. Register with HATCH and submit your application today.

Program Highlights

• Pitch at SXSW – Finalists will have 4 minutes to pitch their revolutionary startup to a panel of experts and an influential audience. They will also field probing questions from judges on their product, market, business model, and more.
• Coaching – An experienced coach will provide one-on-one mentoring to selected participants prior to SXSW, assisting finalists in preparing for the competition.
• Education – Each finalist will receive access to online education to assist them in hatching their business plans and ensuring the best possible presentation at SXSW.

Key Dates and Milestones

• February 6 – Applications Due
• Mid February – Finalists Selected
• Mid February – One-on-one coaching and educational webinars begin
• March 11 – Pitch competition at SXSW in Austin, TX

Reasons To Apply

• Focused exposure to investors and industry leaders as part of the judging & coaching process.
• Exposure to the tech savvy SXSW audience at an official SXSW event.
• Photo and interview opportunities with the attending press.
• Outstanding prizes.

Eligibility Requirements

In order to compete in HATCH, finalists must meet the following eligibility requirements:

• A company’s product / service must have launched no earlier than March, 13, 2011.
• A company’s product / service must not be launched after June 13, 2012.
• Companies will be allowed to submit only one product / service to HATCH. Companies who submit more than one product / service will not be eligible to participate.
• Founders of the applying startup must retain some portion of ownership in the company to be eligible to participate.
• Must not have raised over five million in funds from combined funding sources.
• The presenter must actively participate in the educational and coaching components of HATCH.
• The presenter must have a SXSW Interactive, Gold, or Platinum badge and be in attendance at check-in time on March 11, 2012 at the event venue in Austin, TX.

For more information on the Microsoft BizSpark Plus Program, please see below (article courtesy of the BizSpark Group Blog).

Today the BizSpark team is pleased to announce BizSpark Plus, an extension of the Microsoft BizSpark Program. BizSpark Plus will provide exceptional Microsoft offers to high-potential startups through a global network of BizSpark Plus Partners selected from leading incubators and accelerators.

BizSpark Plus Partners are chosen from local markets based on their track record of attracting and working with world-class startups. Here are just of few partners who have already joined as BizSpark Plus Partners:

• TechStars (Global)
• Startup Weekend (Global)
• SeedCamp (Global)
• Founder Institute (Global)
• Fumec (Global)
• Springboard (UK)
• TechCity (UK)
• Eura Technologies (France)
• DojoBoost (France)
• Cietec (Brazil)

There will be several offers from Microsoft through this program, the first being  Windows Azure for BizSpark Plus, that allows our partners to provide up to $60,000 of Windows Azure compute and storage per startup over two years.

Our goal is to help startups grow their business and by offsetting startups’ cloud computing costs, this enables startups to spend time and money elsewhere – focusing on solving their business challenges, learning from their users, hiring more developers, investing in marketing and promoting their business or getting new customers.

Over time, we will be extending additional offers through our BizSpark Plus Partners. For more information about the program, visit http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus.

I’m at an amazing conference where teachers and principals are all having conversations about how to be more innovative educators.  I’m in discussions about how to turn classrooms into learning spaces, how to think about “discipline” as another way that you reinforce the teaching philosophy, and learning the latest techniques to measure your importance to your social network – all against the backdrop of this amazing high school where the proof is right in front of you because the conference is run by the students.  I’m hearing principals introduce “radical” notions of how they want their teachers and students to “fail faster” and watching the looks of horror in the audience slowly turn to recognition.  As the Education Leader of Startup Weekend Education, I’m excited to be here.  I am proud to be part of an organization that kicks-off startups, kick-starts communities, and kicks the entrepreneurially curious in the behind.  I’m here mixing and mingling and learning and hoping to connect with innovative reform-minded teachers that might be interested in attending or organizing a Startup Weekend Education (SWEDU) event in their community.  But something is amiss.

Judging from the looks I’ve gotten from this special breed of teacher that attends conferences like EduCon, here my friend, blogger Audrey Watters has achieved the status of E.F. Hutton or Alan Greenspan.  Here a mere sigh of her disapproval moves public opinion and defines heroes, villains, goats and victims in the world of Ed-Innovation.  She and I hugged and had a great chat this morning.  I still love her, I do.  I know you can only be heartbroken when you’ve first given your heart to something.  But her comments the day before this conference have cast SWEDU and me as now being aligned with the enemy.

My last encounter with a very tech savvy teacher weighs heavily on my mind.  She had a particularly great comment in the discussion and I approached her afterwards and saw her face change from cordiality, to curiosity, to recognition to disdain in our 10-second encounter.  I opened my laptop to take notes and four key takeaways took shape:

Lesson #1) BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: Audrey’s piece is here.  It’s not particularly rough.  I don’t dispute the facts.  In it she simply expresses her sadness and concerns and doubts about the direction of SWEDU.

In the weeks leading to the partnership with Pearson, Audrey was among the voices I sought for consultation.  Her advice was honest and wise and hasn’t changed. As we approached announcing the new relationship with Pearson, I pitched Audrey the opportunity to interview my Pearson counterpart and me together.   I looked at it like a couple seeking marriage counseling as they entered into a relationship.  I thought her the ideal foil to ask the hard, objective questions a new couple may be too polite or inexperienced to discuss by themselves.  She did and concluded her piece by editorializing her sadness.

The lesson here is, although I’d invited the attention, I wasn’t adequately prepared when it arrived a little differently than I expected.   It’s been 72 long hours while I formulated this response.  This weekend I saw how many educators read Audrey’s latest critique of SWEDU as their cliff-notes to the state of EdTech reform without familiarizing themselves with so much of her previous praise.   I’d lost the opportunity to introduce myself, to extend the SWEDU brand and establish commonality of purpose with passionate, reform-minded educators. I’d also missed my opportunity to explain myself – to show how Audrey and I both care deeply about getting more innovation into education.  We just have different ideas about the best ways to enable that.   I didn’t get to explain that I don’t subscribe to the belief that education reform is a win-lose game where, in order for innovation to be unleashed, the establishment must be upended.  I didn’t get to make the larger point that what I do know is that education reform faces some major obstacles.   In order to overcome those challenges, our community of startups needs to acquire some resources that are beyond our control.

Lesson #2) BE WILLING TO LEARN IN PUBLIC.  One of the most powerful ideas I will take away from EduCon is how teachers can build an incredible culture of learning when they get off their pedestal as the authoritarian and become the model learner in the classroom.  (I’m sure this is no secret to all you blogger/author/consultants out there). Embracing this first lesson helped me turn a lot of unproductive energy I wanted to spend on defending my integrity or attempting to win a debate into a very liberating admittance of what we’ve said all along.  Startup Weekend Education is a startup.  As the leader, my job is to #1 have a compelling vision, #2 ascribe to a set of values and principles that guide my strategic choices, and #3 constantly experiment and help this organization learn its way toward sustainably delivering the vision.  Startup Weekend Education is about building entrepreneurial teams, companies and communities that make meaningful advances in the way people teach and learn.  The community makes it happen, my role is to coach, to be a model learner, empathetic advocate and create the conditions where curiosity leads to inquiry and then to growth. In keeping with that, the response I choose in this moment of crisis is to use it as a moment to reinforce my own pedagogical philosophy – admit my commonality with those I lead, share a little about what choices led me to this point and, hopefully, learn something in the process.

Lesson #3) FOCUS ON SOLVING SIGNIFICANT PROBLEMS IN BIG MARKETS

The customers of Startup Weekend Education are entrepreneurs, education domain experts, developers and designers.  My job starts with asking “What problem can Startup Weekend Education solve for them better than any other entity in the world?”  The answer to the question is big and scary.

Even as education attracts increased interest from would-be “disrupters” there is also a murmuring consensus.  When people say that education is “ripe” for disruption, they largely mean that the opportunity exists to go around institutional sales to the education bureaucracy and effectively target parents, teachers, students or a few progressive charter schools or networks that can pay for solutions.

None of these revenue models are bad things, but they all come with trade-offs.  Is it acceptable or sustainable to shift more of those costs towards teachers who already shoulder more than their fair share?  Targeting affluent parents or well-funded charters helps progressive ideas get off the ground but often contributes to the already stark inequity in education.

We need an all-of-the-above strategy, but entrepreneurial ed-innovation is operating with one-arm tied behind its back.  Within the $900 Billion (US) spent by federal, state and local decision makers on our educational system are hundreds of billions spent on books, tests, teaching tools, professional development solutions, software and hardware.  What even the “disrupters” have conceded is that, gaining access to this market is determined less by product benefits, user-experience or evidence of effectiveness as it is determined by relationships and access.   The 5 or so global education corporations are largely successful because they have the scale to operate huge sales forces that maintain relationships with networks of decision makers and very effectively push their portfolio of products through the bureaucracy.  Without this network, outside ideas are effectively blocked from gaining significant traction. With no hope of a mega-blockbuster, large VC investments are hard to come by, which in turn makes earlier investors more scarce.  The pattern continues down the chain until there is little entrepreneurship at the very early stage because there’s little support for entrepreneurs (capital) or there’s only capital for certain types of ideas.   The big problem my SWEDU customers face is that the startups within the community have a tougher time finding funding or attracting top talent to work on education ideas.

So this is where Pearson comes in.  The largest and most dominant of all the learning companies, Pearson knows that bureaucracy better than anyone.  SWEDU brings in global partners (Google, Gates and Grockit, along with Kauffman) because they can commit resources to helping educational startup companies grow, because they bring global brand recognition, and because they are the best at what they do and enable our partnership to tackle problems we could do without them. Pearson and Startup Weekend Education have entered into an arrangement to see if there is a solution we can develop that would help innovative education entrepreneurs navigate the bureaucracy.  Do I have all the answers?  No.  Do I know there is a high chance of failure?  Yes.  Do I understand the risks and concerns of the community on which we depend?  I hope after reading this you think so.  If not send me an email and I’ll get back to you Khalid@startupweekend.org

Lesson #4) EARLY ADOPTERS FALL IN LOVE FAST AND SOMETIMES GET HURT.  SHOW THEM LOVE ALWAYS.

The patron saint of entrepreneurs Steve Jobs, once was boo-ed at his own conference as he announced a deal with Microsoft.  He knew that Microsoft controlled a valuable resource; in his case it was Microsoft’s windows, office and browser software that had become the standard for pc communications.  Apple needed access.  Jobs had a very different vision for how Apple would grow and it didn’t involve wasting energy trying to out-innovate Microsoft in the arena of documents and spreadsheet formats.  Most assuredly, he was booed by some of Apple’s strongest supporters who saw Apple as a rebellion against the evils of Microsoft as much as it was a movement for a more human-relatable computing experience.  Jobs famously shushed the crowd with, ”We have to give up the false notion that for us to succeed Microsoft has to fail.”  History has proven that Jobs knew what he was talking about and that he had a plan, but we only know that because Jobs had the guts and the empathy to stand up and tell the Apple enthusiast community personally. Your customers and community will make lots of demands of your startup.  Many entrepreneur gurus will tell you to ignore them.  The truth is that you owe them a debt for their early support without which you would still be floundering in ambiguity about your business, product or market.  You don’t have to fulfill every wish they have, but every once in a while, just pause, get on stage, tell them that you’ve really listened and heard them, tell that you have a plan, thank them for all their support, allow them to be sad, admit you’re a little bit scared and then invite them to walk with you in this new direction.