Shark tank, Stamford-style
After a fourth quarter that saw Connecticut”™s lowest venture capital levels in 15 years, funding has yet to rebound in the early going in 2012, even as Stamford gears up a mini boot camp for entrepreneurs.
Startup Weekend Stamford is scheduled for March 30 and April 1 at the new Stamford Innovation Center, a business incubator in which Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. also is gearing up a lab to assess new technologies.
Designed as an immersive experience, Startup Weekend Stamford begins Friday evening with one-minute pitches from would-be entrepreneurs, with audiences voting for the best plans. Teams then coalesce to hash out the rough outline of a business plan over the following 48 hours, with judges and participants voting for winners on Sunday.
The sessions are meant to galvanize would-be entrepreneurs into actually starting a company ”“ and help them find key personnel, whether in the form of web developers, financial backers or business support.
At press deadline, more than 50 people had registered to attend, with organizer Edward Petner expecting a big push in the final week to draw as many more. Sessions run until at least 10 p.m. and as late as midnight with startups able to state their needs and tap advice from mentors on hand.
Startup Weekend Stamford”™s supporters include the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which this month released a study suggesting that 46 percent of successful startups are launched by “user entrepreneurs,” those that conceived a product or service for their own use before seeing the broader commercial appeal. User entrepreneurs are different from other entrepreneurs, the researchers suggested, in that they arrive with concrete and tangible ideas.
“Over 100 young people in this area are really going to take a huge step forward for the culture of entrepreneurialism which is what this country was built on,” Petner said. “It takes courage, guts ”¦ to create your own business, and be the master of your own future.”
The city continues to draw startups getting small amounts of seed-stage funding, but overall venture capital funding remains tepid in Fairfield County to start the year.
In February, Skystream Markets took funding to relocate from New York City to Stamford as it develops a platform for trading renewable energy credit certificates. This month, a Stamford company called Lumesis Inc. reported a $2.8 million tranche of funding as it sells software to help fixed income finance investors assess municipal revenue and spending, and the risks those trends might reveal. And Norwalk-based HealthPrize Technologies L.L.C. reported $2 million in funding, as it develops a rewards system to keep people on medication and other treatments.
Petner hopes the venture money will be drawn to the entrepreneurship magnet Stamford Innovation Center”™s organizers are attempting to build.
“My biggest hope and ”¦ is that a year from now three or four of them will have gotten their first financing and one of them has gotten their first $1 million in revenue,” he said. “We are lucky in that we are right here in Fairfield County which has a number of angel investors.”