Startup Weekend Stamford enlivens Old Town Hall

I wrote this article for the Fairfield County Business Journal

Matt Murphy warbled about his website to help people ready for a first date. A teen and his mom shared his iPod game to teach young children Chinese. Linda Woods huddled with her team over orange-juice futures.

On March 30, the inaugural Startup Weekend Stamford squeezed fresh entrepreneurial juice out of Old Town Hall as 48 entrepreneurs made one-minute pitches to a sold-out crowd of 150 people.

Immediately evident was the energy and enthusiasm among the mostly young professionals. People were there for the experience and were excited also about a personal need they had or product or service that would fill a hole in the market.

After the initial pitches, entrepreneurs, marketers, developers, designers, mentors and generalists hashed out ideas in groups. Along with judges, each had three votes to bestow on the strongest ideas to flesh out for the finals April 1 at the University of Connecticut Stamford. The field was winnowed to a dozen winning ideas, with teams of up to eight people forming to figure out a plan of action.

I was a mentor for three teams, but spent a good part of the weekend with Agricomm Weather, which took third place. Headed by Linda Woods, in town from Boston, the team included a Stamford developer, two members who worked in finance in New York City and a New York Yankees intern.

Agricomm has an exclusive arrangement to provide weather information to commodity traders using 650,000 sensors, instead of the 8,000 currently used. They met Friday night, most of the day and night on Saturday, and members even studied and developed forecasts for orange juice futures remotely and financial projections right in the classroom. The team bonded well and enjoyed the experience and said they will stay in touch.

I also worked with Matt Murphy, an MBA student at Babson College, who sang his pitch. His company became LoveSquadron – the team also flirted with Date Hint – with a platform for people to get advice from friends on what to do on first dates and other life events. Harmonizing his presentation with a personal story, Murphy was the runner up.

The first-place team, led by Amee Patel and Michelle Larivee from Wharton Business School, came up with an idea to help students manage their debt. Winners won legal, accounting and incubation space for their ventures.

This was the fourth Startup Weekend event in Connecticut – and the best, according to Joe DeMartino, a judge and former president of the Angel Investors Forum. Other events were held in Storrs, Hartford and New Haven.

“The quality of the presentations was clearly the best we have seen,” DeMartino said. “There are more developers and media savvy professionals in Stamford.”

Sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation, Startup Weekend events are held each weekend in cities globally, with over 45,000 people attending since it began. In case you missed Stamford Startup Weekend (information is online at stamford.startupweekend.org), New York City will hold a similar event May 4-6 focused on music and gaming.



Doug Campbell is CEO of the Success Coach, a Darien consultancy. He can be reached at doug@thesuccesscoach.com.

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