I know. I’ve been hard to nail down for a while and an absolute ghost for the last month. So I’ll answer all the nagging questions about my unexpected hiatus with a tangential question:
How long did it take you prepare for this year’s fantasy football season?
I know. Let me shake off the rust.
You may have taken a few minutes or a few hours to get ready for your draft. If you’re hardcore and in more than, let’s say, two leagues (two leagues, that’s cute), you may have taken up to a week to get your act in order. You might not care about fantasy football. Read on. Relevance follows.
You may or may not know this about me, but my day job is at Automated Insights, where I was brought on over three years ago (!) to get the company from stats on websites to automated, personalized, big-data-sourced narrative content, delivered to anyone by any means necessary.
One of the ways we do this is by generating professional sounding, insight-packed articles about your fantasy football team. We’ll give you a draft report card, preview your matchup, recap your matchup, and update your league, with pictures, charts, graphs, and slang. By the time the season is over, we’ll have generated well over 250 million personalized articles about fantasy football at about 1,100 articles per second.
Thus, I’ve been preparing for this year’s fantasy football season for a little over three months – 12-16 hours a day, including weekends. And I could have used another couple weeks.
Here’s the relevant part. I’ve had to be very, very careful about what startup events I could attend over the summer. Now, I should relay this because I want you to believe this: Even with an extended murder schedule, I still found it very necessary to get out into the startup community, as an entrepreneur, to take part in the maintenance and upkeep, including hosting two ExitEvent Startup Socials (but not three).
Fortunately for me, but not so much for the community, summer was dead in the startup event space. Fine. That’s cool. I’m sure I wasn’t the only entrepreneur chugging along at 80 hours a week and you all probably even took vacations. You have to.
So maybe it’s a side effect of the absolute dearth of activity, but September is going to be loaded with things to do. Now, once the ref blows the final whistle on the Redskins/Eagles Monday night game, my schedule lightens up to a much more comfortable 60 hours a week. So I can make some of these events, but not all of them.
I’m assuming the same is true for you, and since you stuck with me through my glorious return babble, I’m going to help you out. Here are four startup-related events starting Wednesday and running through next week. Yes. Four events in seven days. What’s more is I’ll have even more September events in a column coming tomorrow.
- Startup and Play
September 4th in Raleigh (Details at website)
In the Spring of 2012, Aaron Gerry and Patrick Shampine pulled me aside at an ExitEvent Startup Social and graciously asked if they could host a similar-but-different event showcasing local consumer-facing startups to the general public.
My response? “I’ll see you in court.”
Since then, Startup and Play has held three showcases, each attracting a diverse mix of presenting startups, from bakeries to gaming companies, who pay $50 to bring their wares to the general public. This fourth event has new organizers, but the format is unchanged.
Aimed at anyone interested in the startup scene in the Triangle, this event is laid back and usually a bit unorthodox. Go if you want to blow off some steam and learn a bit about what’s going on around you.
- Hopscotch
September 5th – 7th in Raleigh (Details at website)
But wait, this is a music festival.
Yes it is. And it has absolutely nothing to do with startups, other than there have been several attempts to include a music festival, including Hopscotch, into a kind of South by South West.
This year, there is a lot of “startup” unofficially wrapped around Hopscotch. But make no mistake, Hopscotch is a straight-up, nationally-recognized musicfest.
However, just because it doesn’t say “startup” anywhere on it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. Take a night off, Poindexter.
- Triangle Entrepreneurship Week
September 9th – 12th in Raleigh (Details at website)
A few years ago, TEW was a patchwork of panels and classes held at various venues around Raleigh. I remember part of it being in a basement of a church, which I think is awesome.
Now it’s still a combination of different events, but with bigger venues all over the Triangle – be advised that you may be signing up for something in Chapel Hill, or Durham, or downtown Raleigh. This year, you can register (and pay for) one event or more or get a week pass that gets you into almost everything (see below).
Co-founders Jon Leonardo and Sarah Wechsberg are still running TEW, which is aimed at early-to-mid stage startups either looking to get their company off the ground, seeking customers, or raising seed-stage investment. Go if you’re an early-stage startup or want to be.
Two events linked to TEW, but excluded from the week pass, stand on their own. I’ll give you one today and one tomorrow.
Freaking cliffhanger. I’m back.
- Raleigh Innovation Summit
September 11th in Raleigh ((Details at website)
If you like ideas, this is for you.
It’s the follow-up to last year’s Innovation Summit, where local civic and government leaders came together at the Convention Center for topic discussions, working groups, and presentations.
It’s a cross between brainstorming session and volunteer corps, with an emphasis on producing several initiatives that can be executed over the coming year.
Innovation Summit isn’t about building startups, it’s about building a startup support structure. It’s aimed at the feeders of the startup community (to use the leaders and feeders analogy) – which are those people who are not the entrepreneurs themselves but have a vested interest in the growth of the startup community.
It should be noted though, that participation from entrepreneurs is welcomed and sought out. It’s $50 to attend, $10 for entrepreneurs. See? They want you there.
Go if you have a vested interest in the Triangle as a nationally recognized startup hub and you think you can contribute.
Editor’s note: Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. He is VP of Product at Automated Insights and the founder of startup network and news resource ExitEvent. Follow him at @jproco or read him at http://joeprocopio.com
