File photo of Jacqueline Hughes from Austin Startup Week’s Startup Crawl. Photo by Laura Lorek.
This is the fifth annual five day event. It kicks off Monday, Oct. 5th and runs through Friday, Oct. 9th. It started in 2011, the same week Silicon Hills News launched and we’ve covered it every year. Jacqueline Hughes and Joshua Baer created the event to put a spotlight on the city’s startup community.
Baer has also declared Monday, Oct. 5th, the first day of Austin Startup Week, as vintage T-shirt day. Baer is a passionate and vocal advocate of quality T-shirts as a great marketing vehicle for tech startups.
One of the big events every year is the Austin Technology Council’s Battle of the Tech Bands, in which members of various tech companies with bands compete to be crowned the best band. It takes place Monday night, Oct. 5th, at Mohawk.
The Built in Austin job fair is also a great place to find a new gig. This event also takes place on Monday right before the Battle of the Tech Bands at Mohawk. It starts at 3:30 p.m. and runs until 6 p.m.
A new event this year is the Women in Tech mixer put on by Gina Helfrich at the Scarborough Building, 101 W. Sixth Street, Eighth floor. Helfrich flew in for Austin Startup Week in 2013 and then decided to move to Austin and work in tech. The event is co-sponsored by “Feminist Hack ATX, Women Who Code ATX, PyLadies ATX, Austin All-Girl Hack Night, EdTechWomen ATX, recruitHER, Third Coast InnovateHER, Lesbians Who Tech, Women in Data Science ATX, ATX Women Hardware Hackers, and Austin Pair Programming.”
On Wednesday, UK Trade & Investment Office will host Britain Open for Business, a Texas breakfast for startups and technology companies interested in expanding their business to the United Kingdom. It will feature experts from UK-based law firm, Taylor Wessing and UK-based accounting firm Blick Rothenberg. The event will kick off at 8:30 a.m. at Old School, 401 E. Sixth Street.
To further showcase the international flair of this year’s startup week, also on Wednesday morning, an Austin technology startup has a chance to win an all expense paid trip to Oslo, Norway for Oslo Innovation Week. The pitch competition is being put on by Fred Schmidt and will be held at Capital Factory.
To add to the bounty of riches on Wednesday at 10 a.m., PR Over Coffee’s Dave Manzer is hosting the third annual “Meet and Pitch the Tech Writers panel” at Techstars at 412 Congress Ave. The event features Stacey Higginbotham with Fortune, Tom Cheredar with Gigaom, Jared Wynne with the Daily Dot and Laura Lorek with Silicon Hills News.
To cap off the day, Wednesday evening, Ruben Cantu hosts the Austin+Social Good Summit featuring its third annual fast pitch competition.
Like the fireworks at the end of a great event, on Thursday, the Austin Startup Crawl takes place. It gets bigger and bigger every year as does Austin’s startup community. It is limited to the first 5,000 people to sign up for the crawl. It even has its own app, which provides an updated map of all the startups participating in the crawl.
Austin Startup Week concludes with a hangover breakfast on Friday morning.
Austin Startup Week is free, but the organizers do want everyone to register to attend the various events around town. It is sponsored this year by Capital Factory, Hired, Techstars and Taecho Group.
Correction: It is actually the fifth annual ATX Startup Grind. It’s been four years since it launched but this is the fifth event. Thank you Scott Gress for pointing that out!
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