What Is Startup Weekend?

What is Startup Weekend?

Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.

Startup Weekend Global Site

Past event…

Event Ended

The Evergreen School

15201 Meridian Ave N Shoreline, WA 98133

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Watch the Livestream below at 5pm PST!



Startup Weekend EDU is a 54-hour event where teachers, developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to identify needs in the education realm and form collaborations to begin solving problems. Rather than innovating in their own silos, Startup Weekend EDU participants share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups to innovate education!

Read why educator and organizer Lindsey Own thinks teachers and technologists need each other to innovate education.

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Schedule

Friday

Oct 19
  • Registration starts & open brainstorming
  • Welcome keynote & invite to focus group tables
  • Dinner & focus groups
  • Pitches start
  • Attendees vote for the top ideas
  • Teams start forming and discussing ideas
  • Start to formalize teams and take an inventory of skills. Be honest, and direct about what resources and skills are needed for the weekend.
  • Venue closes. Venue closes. Work may continue elsewhere though!

Saturday

Oct 20
  • Arrive, simple breakfast & coffee
  • Teams formed and setting up workspace for the weekend
  • Lunch
  • Call for needs & skills
  • Coaches help teams one-on-one. They are here to help!
  • Dinner
  • Mid weekend check-in, status reports, call for help
  • Venue closes. Work may continue elsewhere though!

Sunday

Oct 21
  • Arrive, simple breakfast & coffee
  • Call for help (this is self motivated, so don’t be shy)
  • Lunch
  • Coaches arrive… ASK QUESTIONS
  • Gut check. Start prepping for presentations
  • Dinner
  • FINAL PRESENTATIONS
  • Judging & awards
  • Wrapup
  • Go home!
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Speaker

Sandi Everlove

Chief Learning Officer, Washington STEM

Sandi Everlove is the Chief Learning Officer at Washington STEM. In this role, Sandi leads efforts to generate and share knowledge of innovation in STEM teaching and learning. In addition to working with funded partners to document insights and lessons learned, Sandi identifies and promotes promising practices from around the state, the nation, and internationally.

Prior to joining Washington STEM, Sandi founded TeachFirst where she led the development of innovative multimedia and face-to-face tools and resources to support teacher learning. This included producing hundreds of online videos that demonstrated research-based instructional strategies, facilitator guides, discussion protocols, leadership resources, and student shadow protocols.

A passionate advocate for children, Sandi brings on the ground experiences to her work in STEM education. She is an award-winning high school chemistry teacher with Seattle Public Schools and received the Washington State Golden Apple Award in 1998. Through a U.S. Department of Education grant, she wrote and piloted a number of innovative science courses including an award-winning high school science ethics class. Her efforts extend internationally including creating and leading professional development courses for teachers in Guatemala.

Sandi co-founded the Lake Washington Girls Middle School, the first nonprofit, secular all girls’ middle school in Washington state. She has also served on the Mount Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr. scholarship committee for over 20 years.

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Judges

Frank Catalano

Principal, Intrinsic Strategy   |  

Frank Catalano, Principal, Intrinsic Strategy is an industry consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. Focusing on marketing and brand strategy as a consultant, he is a former senior vice president at Pearson and serves on the Education Division board of the Software and Information Industry Association. He's also a columnist for the tech news site GeekWire and a regular contributor to the NPR/KQED education site MindShift and the edtech news site EdSurge. He tweets @FrankCatalano and consults as Intrinsic Strategy.

Teri Hein

Executive Director, 826 Seattle   |  

Teri Hein is the founding Executive Director of 826 Seattle, a nationally recognized tutoring and writing center. She is also a published author and 25 year veteran classroom teacher.

Marina Martin

US Department of Education

Marina is one of the inaugural 18 Presidential Innovation Fellows, chosen by US CTO Todd Park as "the most badass of the badass innovators" earlier this year. She currently works as the first-ever Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the US Department of Education and as the Head of the Education Data Initiative. Marina works to liberate education data to fuel innovation, revenue, and job growth in the private sector, working with private sector companies and startups to highlight and improve open educational data sets and standards.

Lisa Castaneda

Special Judge - Application Of Gaming In Education Prize

Lisa has been teaching for nine years and during that time has taught all of the grades from kindergarten through 8th grade. Currently, she is a math specialist in the Upper Division at The Evergreen School in Shoreline, WA. She has a Masters degree in Education and has done research examining the effectiveness of video games in the math classroom. As a beta test teacher for the software company, Valve, she helped to design lessons and teach using their Portal 2 Puzzle Maker program. She was featured in a case study by Katie Salen on learning with video games and is involved in technology and learning groups in the Seattle area. Lisa recently presented at the Games in Education Symposium in New York. She is a gamer and is always looking for new ways to incorporate video games into the classroom.

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Coaches

Brandt Redd

Senior Technology Officer, Gates Foundation   |  

Brandt Redd is a co-founder of Folio Corporation (Electronic Publishing) and Agilix Labs. (Education Technology). He served as Chief Scientist in the early days of Ancestry.com and presently serves as Senior Technology Officer in Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He holds a BS in Computer Science and an MBA both from Brigham Young University. Brandt is passionate about the use of technology to personalize the education experience.

Alicia Craven

Programs Manager, 826 Seattle   |  

Alicia Craven is the Programs Manager at 826 Seattle, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center dedicated to helping youth, ages 6 to 18, improve their creative and expository writing skills, and to help teachers inspire their students to write. The center has an unorthodox facade-- the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Store, and students enter the writing and tutoring room through a teleporter door. All 826 programs--after school tutoring, writing workshops, field trips, and in-schools projects are offered to students, teachers and schools free of charge.

Mike Pinkowish

User Interface Engineer, Facebook   |  

Mike is a User Interface Engineer at Facebook where he has been building Timeline. Before Facebook, Mike graduated Rensselaer in 2011 and has interned at YouTube and Google Earth. In his free time, Mike skies, hikes, and drinks beer, all while taking photos.

Andrew Dumont

Director of Business Development, SEOmoz   |  

I guess you could call me an entrepreneur, but that's a loaded term. Currently, I spend my days as the Director of Business Development at SEOmoz, managing our API business and helping out on the acquisition front. Over my years in the technology space (which started at the age of 18), I've played the role of startup founder and startup accelerator. During that time, I've grown passionate about technology that is beautifully designed, simplistically crafted and built to make our lives easier -- it's what I strive for in the products that I build. My work has been routinely recognized across an array of technology blogs, I've mentored at groups like Startup Weekend and Teens In Tech and my words are occasionally found in major print publications, books and around the web. Also, I'm terribly important.​ ​Currently, I live in downtown Seattle and spend my evenings huddled around my MacBook Air, 2 iPhones and 4 coffee machines.

Andy Boyer

Founder, Relaborate   |  

Andy Boyer is a co-founder of Relaborate, a Seattle start-up building software that enables companies to improve their content marketing efforts. Since 1996, he's worked with a number of technology companies including RealNetworks, Amazon, Microsoft, GotVoice, Imagekind and more. Ina ddition to his full-time position at Relaborate, he is also on the faculty of the University of Washington, teaching the MBA class on Entrepreneurial Marketing.

Gabe Pelegrin

Designer, Startup Weekend

Gabe packs a lot of punch in a small frame. With a background in marketing and design, it's no wonder he has a penchant for building cool things in the physical world and online. He can tell you how to position your brand, how to implement your message strategy, and possibly build your site. Gabe previously used his powers for good at the Ablola Group online agency launching SEO client’s strategies and helping InternMatch launch a westcoast rollout. These days, he can be found at Startup Weekend HQ designing cool tools for organizers and attendees and helping make Startup Weekend a house hold name for anyone with an idea.

Rob Newton

Product Marketing Manager, Google   |  

Rob currently manages B2B marketing for new search formats at Google. He has previously held various marketing and business development roles at Rhapsody, Photobucket, Ontela, and Corbis.

Tolis Dimopoulos

Founder, Sophos Law   |  

Tolis is the managing attorney and founder of Sophos Law, a boutique corporate law firm focusing on technology startups and high growth companies. Tolis serves as outside general counsel to his clients and generally handles corporate, financing, and IP transactions. In addition to a law degree, Tolis has an engineering undergraduate degree and an MBA with a focus on finance. Tolis regularly hosts free office hours (ohours.org/tolisdimopoulos) and blogs at TheNeighborhoodEntrepreneur.com.

Kathy Carper

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft   |  

Kathy is a Senior Program Manager on the Windows team. She has been with Microsoft since 2001 and worked both as a software engineer and a program manager. Before Microsoft, Kathy worked at HI-CE in the University of Michigan where she works on handheld educational software. She worked directly with students in the greater Detroit school district and looked for ways to use technology to enhance teaching and learning of science in K-12 schools.

Randy Weiner

Ed/Tech Entrepreneur

Randy is a co-founder at a stealth ed tech company, co-founder and Chairman of the Board at Urban Montessori Charter School and a consultant to education and technology companies. He has worked in start-ups for the last ~15 years and has served as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Learn Capital, with an emphasis on education and gaming. Randy is expert in agile development, with interests in Lean, Kanban and Queuing Theory practices. A Teach For America alumnus, Randy has five years of teaching experience gained in Oakland, CA and Antananarivo, Madagascar. Randy holds B.A.s in Philosophy and Spanish from Middlebury College and an MA in Education from Stanford University.

Virl Hill

Former President and CEO of Blade Games World   |  

Virl Hill is an angel investor and strategic advisor who builds digital businesses and companies. His successful experience in Hollywood and in digital media technology give him a unique perspective on how to profitably deliver engaging experiences to consumers across any platform, any time. He most recently served as President and CEO of Blade Games World and previously led a variety of operating, business development and strategic planning teams at Rhapsody, Rollingstone.com, RealNetworks and The Walt Disney Company.

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Organizers
Steve Siden
Lindsey Own
Amy Lin
Jessica Hendrawidjaja
Alex Diaz
Somin Bach
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