The 2017 Denver Startup Week has come and gone and a few team members from our Denver office were able to take part in the excitement. While last year’s event broke the previous year’s attendance record by bringing in 13,700 people, this year’s event saw more than 17,000 individuals participate. Creighton O’Neal, vice president of client service in Denver, and Patrick Kinne, senior consultant, had the opportunity to attend a variety of events related to the technology and startup communities.
2017 Denver Startup Week event: Top Trends in Tech
We’re all familiar with popular buzzwords in the technology landscape today: augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, internet of things and so on. For the average business, it can be hard to imagine how to implement these technologies in the “real world.”
That’s what this Tuesday session was all about — learning how these hot tech trends will disrupt our personal and business lives as we know them today. O’Neal said, “Top Trends in Tech featured a panel of investors and founders of startup companies breaking into these areas. The audience had the opportunity to ask the experts about their experiences and the best ways to break into those areas.”
2017 Denver Startup Week event: Inside the Mind of a VC
This Tuesday session took place at Industry, the coworking space where Twentyseven Global’s Denver office is located. As Twentyseven Global partners with startup companies in a variety of industries to implement technology solutions, O’Neal attended “Inside the Mind of a VC,” to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes of investment deals. O’Neal said, “David Gold, managing director of Access Venture Partners, covered what VCs are looking for when it comes to investments and how they decide to make investments. His overarching point was that there are certain things we invest in and certain things we don’t. That doesn’t mean that just because VCs do not invest in a company, that the company will not be successful. They have to focus on getting quicker rate of return on investment and no matter how promising an idea is, VC’s typically can’t wait for 20 years for something to come to fruition.”
2017 Denver Startup Week event: Startup Crawl
Both O’Neal and Kinne participated in the annual “Startup Crawl” held at various startup offices around Denver. “The Startup Crawl is an event we look forward to attending every year. For the event, we visit several startup companies downtown to learn more about what they’re doing and ask them questions about their businesses.” This year, O’Neal and Kinne chose to visit Blinker, TrackVia, Craftsy and Fastly. O’Neal said, “We had not been to any of those offices before, but we had heard of them and it was great to check out their office spaces.”
2017 Denver Startup Week event: Why is healthcare so hard to reform, what is leading the latest round of innovation and why are so many entrepreneurs getting involved?
As a firm that has experience launching mobile apps and custom software platforms for digital health startups, this session was exciting for O’Neal to attend. Dr. Kim Gandy, founder of Twentyseven Global client Play-it Health, was a panelist for this session as well. O’Neal said, “It was great to see our client Kim Gandy on the panel for this healthtech session and hear her speak about her experiences with Play-it Health.
Overall, O’Neal was impressed by the record-breaking attendance, an indicator of just how many people are trying to get involved in the startup space and how it will continue to expand in the future. He said, “There were so many young entrepreneurs and it was great to see that many people show up. I always wish I could attend more sessions.”
With an eye toward the future, O’Neal said the team is exploring the possibility of Twentyseven Global hosting a session at a future Denver Startup Week to discuss our experience with startups, including how to identify and get your minimum viable product built and more.
