Techstars Startup Weekend
May 20, 2020
Over the weekend of April 23 – 26, 2020, the first remote Techstars Startup Weekend was held. Startup Weekends are a 54 hour event that starts with an idea pitch and develops into a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) through ideation, customer discovery, and team evaluations.
While previous weekends have been held in a city or community with local attendance, this recent event was part of a series of online Techstars Startup Weekends, run at a country level, focusing on solutions that directly tackled COVID-19-related challenges.
For the United States, a West and East coast remote weekend was held. Alaska was well represented at the U.S. West event. Participants came from across Alaska including within the University of Alaska Fairbanks System. Peter Webley (UAF), Solomon Himelbloom (UAF), and Nikki Holmes (UAA) were participants, while Ky Holland was the mentor lead for the U.S. West event. Nigel Sharp was U.S. West technology lead with Arsh Chauhan, Nathan VanOverbeke, and Izac Lorimer a part of the U.S. West technology team. UAF’s College of Business and Security Management along with Health T.I.E. (Testbed for Innovation Enterprises) were community partners while mentors came from across the Alaskan entrepreneurial community.
These participants, mentors, partners, and the technological support highlighted the skills and capacity that the State of Alaska in startup development and to develop solutions for COVID-19 related needs. At the end of the weekend, teams developed pitches for a group of judges to evaluate and to build a top 10 for the U.S.-based teams. Given the remote and online content for this April 2020 event, teams submitted a 5-minute video along with a pitch deck and any MVP/prototype. Webley, Himelbloom, and Holmes along with five other weekend participants, developed out a MVP for “the waiting room of the future”, MedFoyer. Webley says: "It was an amazing experience to be a part of this first remote Startup Weekend.
I joined a great team of medical professionals, software developers, and entrepreneurial experts”. MedFoyer is a virtual physician's office waiting room in which patients can wait for their appointment from the safety of their car, thereby reducing their social contact with other patients and healthcare providers and helping to prevent the transmission of COVID 19 and other communicable diseases. MedFoyer were selected as one of the Top 10 teams from across the U.S.-based Startup Weekend teams. This gave them the chance to pitch their final presentation to three judges as part of a Live Stream event. Additionally, the U.S.-based participants submitted “crowd favorite” votes for the best team and COVID-19 related idea submitted for final judging.
The overall event was won by Varna Health, with MedFoyer taking the crowd vote and coming second overall for all U.S.-based Startup Weekend teams. Webley says “it was a pleasure to be a part of this weekend, the first for Techstars Startup Weekends. We had a great team dynamic during the weekend with everyone working together and combining skills to accomplish our tasks to build the final MVP for pitching. We will be continuing the journey well beyond the weekend”.
Webley would recommend this experience for anyone with an entrepreneurial mindset interested in team-building, design thinking, and innovative research and design. The live Youtube stream for the MedFoyer team 5-minute pitch can be found at https://youtu.be/obhxHA2K2-w?t=3371.tle bit