entrepreneurship, Lean Startup, pitching

Startup Weekend Cologne 2015 – Bigger & better than ever!

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This January 30 to February 1 saw the third Startup Weekend Cologne in equally many years. And what a startup weekend it was! Completely sold out in advance with over 125 participants and a total of over 200 people visiting the same perfect venue as last year, STARTPLATZ.

This time around, our international facilitator was the awesome Adrian Pica that came all the way from Romania! And we also set a new record for participants home distance to Cologne with two participants from Thailand and one from Hong Kong. Wow!

The jury was stellar – as every year (except we lacked women on the jury, although we seriously tried to get a 50/50 mix this year too): Lorenz Gräf, Robert C. Bush Jr, Tim Schumacher, Kai Schmude and Thomas Grota all made sure the teams got properly grilled on the final presentation day.

And the coaches! Oh the coaches! We had a who’s who of local, national and international mentors come help the teams out.

And we were super delighted to welcome back our loyal sponsor from all previous years, unitymedia kabel bw, our loyal venue partner STARTPLATZ, a new major sponsor in KPMG, love and support also from WSS Redpoint, Railslove and O’Reilly providing awesome prizes for the winners.

I’m incredibly proud and excited by what the organizing team of Elisa Porstmann, Hamid Sattarzadeh, Joey Neumann, Mladen Panov, Puja Abbassi and yours truly managed to pull off for 2015 – bigger and better in all regards!

And lest we not forget the volunteers who helped out on the weekend: Hannes, Michael, Merag, Tobias, Simon, Ben, Nikolay, Patrick, Alexandra, et al!

The SW Cologne 2015 organizers and volunteers

The SW Cologne 2015 organizers and volunteers

Stay in touch on our global pages and follow our Facebook page for more information about the next Startup Weekend events in this region.

And the winner was… Find out for yourself: Watch all the final Startup Weekend Cologne 2015 final presentations here, courtesy of NERDHUB.

Fashion Swipe

Hip Hop Diner

Feedback Burger

Jeebly

SpaceRiders

Trustee

Diet Out

Kulturkiste

JamPool

Vitamin B

LoveUP

Spoove

Silence as a Service

Tripspire

Kindermask

Systergy

The winner of Startup Weekend Cologne 2015 was Kindermask!

About Startup Weekend

No Talk, All Action – Launch a Startup in 54 Hours!

Startup Weekend is driven by an international community of volunteers with over 2.000 events held so far, involving over 150,000 entrepreneurs across more than 730 cities in over 130 countries and over 13,000 startups have been created.

Check out http://startupweekend.org for more information on events near you and how to organize one yourself.

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