Hosted by Envirotech, sponsored by Opmantek, Scale Innovations and Study Gold Coast and facilitated by the Gold Coast Innovation Hub’s CEO, Sharon Hunneybell, the annual Gold Coast TechStars Startup Weekend commenced with a bang! Located right next to the iconic Burleigh Beach Headlands, the ocean views and sea breezes served to ignite inspiration and creativity in the 2020 TechStars Startup Weekend attendees.
The weekend kicked-off on Friday night at the Burleigh Surf Life Saving Club, where a big crowd of eager entrepreneurs, innovators, mentors and volunteers gathered to officially open the 2020 Gold Coast TechStars Startup Weekend and to pitch ideas that would be developed across the course of the weekend.
Startup Weekend participants then moved over to the Envirotech Campus located just across the road in the Heritage Established Burleigh Arcade where our startup teams experienced the excitement, hardships, challenges, and success of business development and transforming an idea into a reality in just 54 hours.
On Friday night, five ideas were voted on to become developed over the weekend. The ideas were – Chit-Chat, a ‘pay for expertise’ mobile app; Tri-Buy, a location based app for reducing food waste from restaurants and cafés; Kai Box, a durable, insulated lunch box manufactured from hemp; Perkfluence, a platform that allows you to pay for promotion and curation of content with cryptocurrency; and One Mum, a platform to link young women with local ‘mother figures’ for support and connection. The five Startup ideas were worked on tirelessly by the participants from Saturday through to Sunday afternoon and on Sunday night, the five teams presented their pitches to the judging panel.
The judging panel for the 2020 Startup Weekend were – Danny Maher, CEO of Opmantek and Chairman of the Gold Coast Innovation Hub; Eleanor Carey, co-founder of The Generator; Steve Dalton, entrepreneur, engineer and technology mentor; and Tiah Goldstein, founder of Interwoven.
Although all five teams presented outstanding pitches, the choice of three winners had to be made. For the 2020 TechStars Startup Weekend the three winners were – Chit-chat (first prize); Tri-Buy (runner up & Startup Spirit Award); and Kai Box (third place & Sustainability Development Goals Award).
Congratulations to all attendees who participated in evolving a business idea into a reality in just 54 hours. An incredible effort was made, and the results were outstanding.
Thank you to all attendees, volunteers, mentors, facilitators, judges, and organisers for dedicating their time over the weekend and helping to make our 2020 TechStars Startup Weekend a huge success – It was an amazing event, filled with many challenges, loads of creativity, sportsmanship, resilience and persistence!
