BlitzWeekend – ad-hoc startup launchpad

When Heri first announced BlitzWeekend, I thought it was a slightly better take on the various StartupWeekends which had been painfully going on. That would have been the easy thing to do, but Heri and the guys have taken it a few steps further. Blitzweekend will take place on March 1st and 2nd 2008.

The result is less of a throwaway StartupWeekend and more like a miniature version of Y-Combinator or TechStars. Instead of building one big project, and then leaving the day-to-day operations up to a few unwitting volunteers, BlitzWeekend is a chance to kickstart your own startup that you will be moving ahead with.

Because of that, BlitzWeekend will have a much more well rounded crowd than the normal hack-fests that we are used to. The sponsors, who include BDO Dunwoody, Embrase, Globalex and iNovia Capital, will all be at BlitzWeekend to provide early support and guidance to the startups.

To accompany the weekend, BlitzMaker has also been released. It is a tool to help teams form, share their ideas and to organize before BlitzWeekend.

BlitzWeekend is also reaching out to teams from beyond just Montreal. I would love to see a team from Toronto or Waterloo make the trip over to Montreal. The crew in Montreal has offered to help with expenses by organizing some couches and possibly contributing to travel costs.

Heri described the event like this

– we have partners and sponsors like iNovia Capital (VC fund specializing in early stage funding), BDO, Globalex, Embrase. Actually, it will be an opportunity for any new entrepreneur because the most promising projects will have access to advice from business consultants and key networks. You can view it as a launchpad for startups, à la TechStars

– we will have experts for the event, in the case a team get “stuck” in major problems. each team is going to have “joker cards”, allowing them to call an expert in one specifi domain (technology, design, business plan, marketing etc.)

– we will have a “make” track for developers or designers who just want to create a cool technology and are not sure yet about how to do a business plan. However, we will have a “startup” track, and we will have a panel of “judges” who will be giving them valuable feeedback about their product and business plan.