Startup Weekend, a popular US event that gets entrepreneurs, developers, designers and marketers together to discuss and generate ideas for start-ups, is coming to SA, with two weekends planned for later this month.

Started in the Boulder, Colorado in 2007, Startup Weekend is a nonprofit that hosts events where business ideas are discussed with the aim of turning them into viable propositions during the course of a single weekend.

The organisers of the SA Startup Weekend, the first of which takes place in Cape Town this weekend with a second in Johannesburg next weekend, are Jarrod Hermer and Mikkel Christiansen. They have wanted to host a local version of the event since they first encountered it a couple of years ago.

“When we first approached Startup Weekend it cost US$2 000 just to use the name,” says Hermer. “So instead we started something called Startup Sessions that we ran through the University of the Witwatersrand’s Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering, which gave us a venue to use.”

Hermer says he wanted to create something bigger with more of a brand identity. A friend who worked at Microsoft put him back in touch with Startup Weekend in the US, which had by then decided to waive the fee for interested parties to use the name, event structure and corresponding branding for their events.

Though the events are targeted mainly at the tech savvy, Hermer says they’re open to any business or “ideas-orientated” people. “Startup Weekend is about taking ideas from inception to actionable next steps. It’s a great platform for people with ideas to run them by their peers and see if there is real value in them. It’s also a great way to move from the drawing board to creating actual products and services.”

Hermer says he hopes to achieve similar levels of success here to those enjoyed by Startup Weekend alumni in the US. “In the US, the post-weekend pipeline is very mature, so guys coming out of the weekend have access to seed funders, venture capitalists and angel investors. We’re trying to get the same sort of investors interested here and turn it into a valuable networking event, too.”

Microsoft and Invenfin, a seed and early stage venture capital fund backed by Remgro, are sponsors of the Cape Town and Johannesburg events. Hermer says he wants to increase sponsorship and investor involvement in future and that this first round of Startup Weekend is going to serve as a pilot.

“Very few people understand what Startup Weekend is all about,” says Hermer. “We’re hoping to change that, and to show people that ideas can be converted into actual products and services — and quickly — with the right partnerships and the right approach.”

Startup Weekend Cape Town takes place at the University of Cape Town and the Johannesburg event will happen at Microsoft’s offices in Bryanston. For more information visit capetown.startupweekend.org or johannesburg.startupweekend.org. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral