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Pensacola gears up for second StartUp Weekend

February 11, 2014
/ Ron Stallcup
/ community-dashboard

Pensacola is full of bright ideas. StartUp Weekend Pensacola is out to prove that -- again. Last October, Pensacola saw its first StartUp Weekend, hosted by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the Greater Pensacola Chamber of Commerce and Pensacola State College. Next month, the second StartUp Weekend Pensacola is scheduled for March 28 at the IHMC. Kelly Reeser, director of entrepreneurial development for the Chamber, said when they planned last year’s event, the folks at Up Global (the parent entity for StartUp Weekend) told them that if they got about 40 people to come and participate, the Pensacola event would be a success. There were more than 100 people who spent the weekend at the IHMC, pitching the Next Big Idea and then working in teams to improve the ideas that came to the top of the list. “It was absolutely a success,” Reeser says. “(It shows) there is a creative class but there also are people who are interested in starting businesses in that spirit of entrepreneurship.” Startup Weekends entrepreneurial events organized online that bring budding business owners, angel investors and mentors together for a weekend. Participants organize around ideas that the group thinks have the most potential, refine them and pitch them at the end of the weekend to a panel of judged who choose a winner. Reeser and her team have recruited enough sponsors to cover the cost essentially of feeding the participants for the weekend. Now they are on to recruiting judges, coaches and participants. That means making the rounds on campus at the University of West Florida and Pensacola State College as well as using social media to spread the word and recruit entrepreneurs. So far as Reeser knows, none of the top three finisher from October’s StartUp Weekend have fully functional up and running businesses from their pitches. “But they all have day jobs,” Reeser says. “(Up Global told us) a very small percentage of business continue afterward. It’s more about the experience and the collaboration. the high they get from building something and creating something, be it a product or a website.” For details, visit http://pensacola.startupweekend.or

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Pensacola gears up for second StartUp Weekend

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