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| Startup Weekend Bordeaux |
So here I am from sunny Los Angeles to beautiful Bordeaux, France. I volunteered to be a mentor for their Startup Weekend Bordeaux this past May 15-17 2015.
The event was held at Kedge Business School, what a beautiful campus. From the moment you walk in your eyes cant help but explore. Huge respect for BEM-Bordeux Management School and Marseille based Euromed Management for building an amazing campus.
The event was held at Kedge Business School, what a beautiful campus. From the moment you walk in your eyes cant help but explore. Huge respect for BEM-Bordeux Management School and Marseille based Euromed Management for building an amazing campus.
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| Kedge |
The verticals for the event were Food, Wine, and Tourism.
Friday night kicked off with greetings and welcomes from the organizing team everyone greeted us with smiles from the moment we walked in.
From what I was told the last Startup Weekend in Bordeaux took place 4 years ago. The crew was really excited, energetic and eager to help.
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| Everyone received really cool gift bags |
Our facilitator Judith was very energetic, knowledgeable, she keep the pace moving and was true asset all weekend.
Judith is a startup weekend rockstar, she made us all feel at home and outlined the weekend for us. A true honor to have someone like her work with startup weekend.
Friday night there were over 50 people there it was an awesome energetic group.
It kicked off with a keynote speaker, Vareille Maxime, founder of Jougger he is all about #FrenchTech, a guy smarter than me, I'm glad to call a new friend. Once he was done pitches were on their way.
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| Vareille Maxime There were easily over 20 pitches friday night. The pitches were really cool with a huge part of the participants participating. After the pitches we stepped out to the main area where we had a community dinner, where we all voted on our favorite ideas.  |
| After dinner, 8 ideas were selected as the top ones from our voting. |
Now it came down to forming teams and getting it done!
Once the voting was complete there teams were announced!
The teams were,
Tasty Around
How I Mate
Wine Game
Kick me Out
Book and Park
Tikobe
and Cafe du Bonhur
Once teams were formed, they received their welcome packet (an amazing tool) and immediately went and claimed their spaces. A few of teams got going by putting up their business model canvas, and registering their domain names courtesy of .co, two very smart moves for night one.
Around 1 am we all called it a night to rest up for the following day.
Saturday morning breakfast was served and everyone was off working,
allot of teams validating, working on logos and getting to know each other.
You could sense in the air that really cool things were happening in the building, the energy was great with everyone eager to help or show guidance.
I made it a point to pop in on every group often to help them in any way I could. Everyone seemed really happy and eager to fill me in on their progress and share where they needed help.
Saturday afternoon teams were busy validating, building prototypes and asking questions. There were smiles and laughter everywhere, a very happy campus. I made allot of new friends, as did everyone there. The energy at Kedge was contagious!
We even had musical treats through out the weekend.
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After a long day of putting in work and helping people a group of use took a break for a quick game of basketball to get our blood pumping, boy it worked, from what I heard people worked past 5 in the morning saturday night/Sunday morning!
This is a very hard working startup community.
After dinner saturday night teams got back to work.
Sunday morning got off to an awesome start with a little zumba.
By mid morning you could sense the urgency in a few teams, this is where I feel leaders shine. By lunch allot of people were working on their demos.
The judges were starting to arrive and teams were told it was time.
Everyone delivered solid 5 minute pitches with 4 minutes for questions from the judges. I'll post the pitch videos once the school posts the video.
As expected with an amazing group like this everyone had a demo ready to go!
Some teams incorporated really good use of video in their demos.
At the end of the demos the judges deliberated.
And came back with their answer.
The winners of Startup Weekend Bordeaux were:
1st Place-Book and Park
2nd Place-Cafe Du Bonhur
3rd Place-How I Mate
Afterwards we celebrated and said our sweet goodbyes, its always hard when a startup weekend comes to an end
A piece of my heat stays at Kedge!
Some photos were used as a courtesy by http://twitter.com/SWBordeaux and http://twitter.com/Judith_Kh
Again shout out to the amazing volunteer organizing team and facilitator.
very inspiring!
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