A business can be born within 54 hours.
Startup Weekend, a three-day entrepreneurial conference, is coming to Gainesville Friday to bring professionals together to develop startup businesses.
The event starts at 6 p.m. downtown at the Gainesville Hackerspace, 101 SE Second Place, where management consultant John Spence will speak, said JR Miller, an event volunteer.
Participants will pitch ideas in 60 seconds, and voters will choose the top 10 ideas. Those ideas will then grow over the course of the weekend.
Participants will break into teams and dedicate Saturday and most of Sunday to conducting market research and developing the ideas.
On Sunday night, the teams will present their product to a panel of judges made up of founders and CEOs from across the country, including former UF student Sam Tarantino, co-founder and CEO of Grooveshark, Miller said.
The top three teams will win up to $10,000 in consulting resources, gift cards, giveaways from sponsors and tablets to help their businesses, said co-director Anjali Kundra.
Kundra, 26, graduated from UF’s Masters of Entrepreneurship program and is vice president of client services at RoomSync, a Gainesville-based startup company. She said she encourages students, residents and entrepreneurs alike to attend the event.
“It’s not just meant for people that are in startups already,” she said. “Anyone with drive can do it.”
Student registration is $20, and general registration is $50, Kundra said. Participants who register as developers or designers can get a 25 percent discount using the code HACKERS. Those who don’t want to participate can observe the event on the non-attendee track.
“Our whole goal with this is to highlight the best and brightest of Gainesville,” she said.
The bulk of the event will be in Hackerspace downtown, where the owners will provide resources and space to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, she said.
Kundra’s brother, Nikhil Kundra, 22, will participate in the event. The siblings graduated from the same program.
Nikhil Kundra is a veteran of weekend startup events. He founded Partender, an app that speeds up the bar inventory recording process, at 3 Day Startup Gainesville, which is an event similar to Startup Weekend.
He hopes other participants will have as successful an experience as he did.
“I want them to find something that they’re really passionate about and pitch it and work on it in this startup weekend,” he said. “I want them to see that they’re just as capable of doing anything as anyone else.”
