Startup Milwaukee is launching a new event called Milwaukee Startup Week, six days of programming aimed at fueling and celebrating the Milwaukee and Waukesha metropolitan area’s entrepreneurial community.
The first iteration of the annual event will be held Nov. 1-6. It will include entrepreneurs, investors, local leaders and startup enthusiasts.
“The goal here is to sort of highlight all the different nodes in the startup ecosystem to hopefully break down some of the silos that exist and get people focused on the importance of high-growth entrepreneurship to the success of the southeast Wisconsin region,” said Matt Cordio, co-founder of Startup Milwaukee.
Participating organizations include CrafterSpace, gener8tor, Newaukee, Milwaukee Tech Engine, BizStarts, Ward4, Granular Marketing, IdeaWake, The Commons and other startup groups. Milwaukee Startup Week aims to include and engage all entrepreneurial stakeholders in the Milwaukee area.
“This is not about Startup Milwaukee,” Cordio said. “This is about all of the organizations that we’re partnering with to highlight what they’re doing and highlight all the resources they have available to help startups.”
Startup Milwaukee plans to release the full schedule for the week in August. Organizations interested in hosting an event as part of Milwaukee Startup Week can fill out this form.
While the full slate of events hasn’t yet been solidified, Cordio has a few ideas for the programming.
“One component of it will be a hackathon-type event,” he said. “BizStarts is looking to do a speed mentoring event.”
Cordio also would like to feature female entrepreneurs, an underrepresented group in the startup community, and host a startup crawl happy hour.
“It’s really something that as an entrepreneur myself, that I think we need. Because people don’t realize all the resources that are there to help them,” Cordio said. “I’d really like to highlight all the clusters that are here in southeast Wisconsin.”
In 2013, Cordio also helped organize an event called Startup Weekend Milwaukee, at which entrepreneurs pitched startup ideas and then the best ideas were solidified with business models, coding, designing and market validation over a 54-hour stretch.
