About the author: Nathan Kurtz is a manager in entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. His primary focus is advancing local entrepreneurship initiatives to startups, entrepreneurs, and business and civic leaders throughout the greater Kansas City community.
The theme of this year’s 1Week KC was “Entrepreneurs Together.” And was it ever!
In years past, 1Week KC included dozens of events throughout the week, giving Kansas City-area entrepreneurs myriad opportunities to learn and connect with groups of others across the metro.
This year, however, thanks to the help of our sponsors—Sprint, Kauffman Foundation, UMB, Garmin, EDCKC and KCSourceLink—we focused on one or two signature events per day. It resulted in a lot more collisions, connections and opportunities for innovators to meet. All the usual suspects of the startup scene were there, but there were a lot of new faces as well, demonstrating the depth and strength of Kansas City’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Thanks to our sponsor
Favorite Events
I honestly enjoyed all of the events, but I’ll highlight a couple:
- Kicking everything off was Startup Games. Who doesn’t enjoy games, and who among entrepreneurs isn’t competitive? Well, this evening of games brought out a capacity crowd of more than 120 entrepreneurs (we sadly had to turn people away!) competing, collaborating and creating relationships that really sparked the energy for the week.
- E Day @ The K was special this year because it downpoured for 26 straight hours, right up until 30 minutes before we got started. And there were still more than 400 people—KC Mayor Sly James included—who braved the unseasonable weather to be there.
- And, lastly, who could forget the 1,700 people who came to the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts to watch the Sprint Techstars demo day? It was an amazing amount of support for nine national startups and one international startup on a great stage.
For years I’ve said Kansas City is a great place to start a company. At 1Week KC, more than 3,000 of you from across the region joined in agreement.
Lessons Learned
Preparing for a week-long event like this brings plenty of lessons about better ways of doing things. Notwithstanding 3.5 inches of rain during the week, we learned that it’s always nice to have a little more time to schedule events. Building that buy-in takes time and, like any organization, starts with relationships. And nurturing relationships is the key to success.
People do business with people, and raising money to create these events and offer opportunities for sponsors to engage the community takes a real sense of understanding ROI. Our sponsors and participants made this week possible and some of that ROI is immediate, some will show itself in three months and some in three years. But among our sponsors, they know these activities build engagement and community.
We made the decision to decentralize the events and find local groups, such as Think Big’s Startup Waffles, Hallmark’s Digital Sandbox showcase and the Kauffman Foundation’s 1 Million Cups to align with during the week. These events would have happened anyway, so 1Week KC was a great reason to raise awareness about them.
In the end, we treat 1Week KC like any other startup. It’s now three years old and, like most new ventures, we’re still experimenting and iterating around the best ways to do things. The best way to engage an audience changes as technology changes. So we change with it.
I heard throughout the week from entrepreneurs that they were making connections to find developers, network with customers and meet mentors. This is why 1Week KC matters, why we do it and why so many people volunteer countless hours to make it happen. Until next year!
