W00t! The startup news of Cologne just keeps on rolling. Only recently Startup Weekend Cologne was announced and it seems we (Lukas Strniste (@yeromee), Puja Abbassi (@puja108), Till Ohrmann (@tohrmann) and me (@blacktar) together with Startplatz (@StartPlatz) were stupid crazy enough to bring Startup Weekend NEXT to Cologne too. And that already NEXT WEEK!
Startup Weekend NEXT is a non-profit, but there’s tickets you’ll have to book to help cover the costs of this 3 week intensive educational program. We do however hope to be able to join up with some of the local startup patrons to subsidize your tickets.
Startup Weekend NEXT is only open for teams of 2 or more people and is a 3 week intensive educational programme involving a lot of hard work for the participants. This is a program for dedicated startup entrepreneurs.
So what the heck is Startup Weekend NEXT?
tl;dr – Something freaking awesome for startup entrepreneurs!
Startup Weekend is joining forces with Steve Blank and Udacity to bring you some the world’s most effective experiential entrepreneurship curriculum – Steve’s Lean Launch Pad curriculum (as taught at Stanford, Berkley, and Columbia) – customized and packaged into a 3-week in-person follow-on course to Startup Weekend.
Is NEXT Right for YOU?
Listen to what Eric Koester of Zaarly has to say.
If you are an early-stage startup team looking for a structured program to help you build your business featuring an award-winning online curriculum mixed with in-person coaching and mentoring with a group of fellow entrepreneurs, then NEXT is for you. The Cologne course features leading entrepreneurs, investors and startuppers (details below) beginning on November 28th. Class times and details are below.
- Wednesday, November 28, 2012 — 18:00 – 21:00
- Saturday, December 1, 2012 – 10:00 to 13:00
- Wednesday, December 5, 2012 – 18:00 – 21:00
- Saturday, December 8, 2012 – 10:00 to 13:00
- Wednesday, December 12, 2012 – 18:00 – 21:00
- Saturday, December 15, 2012 – 10:00 to 13:00
NEXT 3-week long, in-person course which provides real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a scalable company. This is not a class about how to write a business plan. It’s not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research library to size markets. And the end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation.
This is a practical class – essentially a lab, not a theory or “book” class – for teams of 2+ co-founders. Similar to Startup Weekend, NEXT creates an entrepreneurial experience with all of the pressures and demands of the real world in an early stage startup. Teams will be getting their hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a customer-driven startup actually works – all aimed towards answering the question of how to turn a great idea into a great company. Co-founders will learn how practically apply business modelling to their company, and customer development to get out of the classroom to effectively test whether/how customers would use your product.
NEXT takes a ‘flipped classroom’ style of learning, where teams are expected to watch lectures and complete assignments between classes, while classtime itself takes a Facilitator-driven approach to sharing learnings and questioning results.
More info can be found at swnext.org
You do not need to have attended a Startup Weekend event to attend this course. You must, however, be part of a team of at least two people working on a startup or startup idea.