3 days. 3 verticals (Education, Healthcare, Gaming). 300+ people.
It was an intense experience, cramming hours of brainstorming, researching, designing, networking and pitching into one packed weekend. I started out on one team building a product initiating offline sessions for people to teach what they know and love (very similar to SkillShare and TeachStreet) and then decided to break off with one team member and focus on Startup-U, and online university for entrepreneurs. By Sunday at 5pm 16 education teams pitched their new businesses and we were all impressed by the winning team for the education vertical, ClassParrot, who built a robust iphone app (with an awesome logo and design) providing a safe way for students/teachers to text.
I highly recommend this event for anyone interested in meeting like-minded folks excited about entrepreneurship; brainstorming and creating a new business in an accelerated environment. Next Startup Weekend Education will be held October 14 in San Francisco.
Overall, it was great to see all the energy and entrepreneurship around tools and services to improve education. One of those entrepreneurs is Roby John, founder of Tap to Learn, a company building apps to help kids learn math, grammar and chemistry who was one of the lucky few chosen to have office hours at TechCrunch Disrupt with Paul Graham and Harj Taggar. During Mega Startup Weekend, Roby’s team built a tool to help parents sort through the 75,000+ ed apps and find apps most appropriate for their child’s age/learning needs. Good luck to them and all the edtech entrepreneurs out there!
edcrunch 