Techstars International Summits
Coming together around the world to connect startup communities.
The top startup community leaders come together for our annual international series of summits around the world. Part workshop. Part experience sharing. Part ecosystem exploration. All fun.
The Global Summits were born out of the need of providing local communities with specific content and resources. When going over the feedback of previous Global Summits, I noticed that a lot of people could not travel far from their communities or felt a disconnection in some of the content offerings.
We also were got more and more requests from multiple partners in our local ecosystems to host events in their communities, so we decided to host 5 or 6 local summits for one year and review the results and compare them to our Global Summit and see if these community specific events had a more profound impact.
We are the world.
The summits brought Startup Digest Curators, Startup Next Organizers, Startup Week Organizers, Startup Weekend Organizers & Facilitators together to build ideas, discuss future visions, share experiences, and strengthen the startup community builders network across different regions (North America, LATAM, Brazil, Europe, MENA, APAC).
Each ecosystem and continent of the world is unique and we wanted not only to showcase our community, but to also learn from the place that hosted the summit and their people. We set out to explore the local startup ecosystem, learning from leaders immersed in what the local community and local Government agencies and corporate partners were doing and create unique set of fun activities that would showcase the local culture and that allowed our Community Leaders to bond and connect.
A big part of the event and key to increasing community engagement, was to be able to share the experience with each other in real time, but avoiding having different platforms. We needed a centralized place for all the things summit: agenda, chat, messages, notifications, photos, etc, I set as one of my biggest goals to develop our own app that would centralize the summit content and information while being easy to use for everybody across our communities, which had different levels of technology adoption.
Planes, trains, and… pontoons.
Our local summits were an all expenses paid event. We rewarded those volunteers that were able to put the most events together throughout the year or build a strong community and entrepreneurial hub. That meant flying people from all across geographies, hotels, food and activities, which brought the budget to pretty high levels. We could have not been able to afford to do this in 6 different countries every year if it was not for our big network of sponsors and partners.
The planning for each international summit would start 9 months prior to the event. I would work and manage our local teams and draft a sponsorship strategy that they could present to potential partners. Our biggest sponsors and donors were usually governments or government agencies (Jordan, Malaysia, Philippines, Brazil, EU, etc.), which required that our sponsorship package offering needed to be really comprehensive and provide them with exposure to our community leaders and the need to utilize multiple local vendors for all of our needs.
Once we would secure the partners, we would plan around other local in kind partnerships like venues, food or activities. We would survey our Community leaders throughout the year to get feedback on content that they would like to see at our summits and would start building our agenda and organizing our different keynotes, tracks and workshops based on it.
Each summit required a significant amount of research to be able to showcase the local culture and entrepreneurial ecosystem and avoid doing tourist activities. When we hosted our summit in a small island in Bohol (Philippines) I found that there was a river, The Loboc, where there was a small local cruise that hosted dinners while navigating the river. There was also a small tribe that lived by the river and that would dance near the water while the boat navigated across. At that time, they did not have any website or way of contacting them from overseas, so I had to work with our hotel there and send someone to make the reservation on our behalf and make sure that all our plans were in place, like starting right before the sunset so the attendees could enjoy both day and night experience of navigating the river. Once I arrived in Bohol a week prior to the event, I went with our team to the boat and we did a test dinner, which I also used as a way to provide our team with a quiet setting bonding experience and set the stage for what was about to happen: set expectations towards the summit, roles and responsibilities, etc.
Techstars APAC Summit Recap Video
Bohol, Philippines
The results.
I planned over 18 international summits over the course of my work at Techstars/UP Global and worked with a multitude of partners and sponsors to create deep learning opportunities for our Community Leaders. As part of this job, I was able to showcase the efforts of local governments, agencies and local businesses that could inspire our attendees while also providing a key entrepreneurial pipeline for these governments to increase visibility and impact in their own efforts towards supporting entrepreneurship.
The Community Leader involvement grew over the years that I was running the International Summits and they would work really hard to score an invitation to the events. We worked tirelessly to be able to bring people from all different environments: rural, urban, main cities, newly created hubs and under developed ones so that everybody would have an opportunity to to learn about different levels of ecosystems. For a lot of them, scoring an invite to the Summit meant the opportunity to increase their network within their region and learn new techniques and tools to build their hub. One of the biggest results of these summits was not only the big increase in organized Startup Weekends, but the increase in Startup Weekends where our Community Leaders would partner with each other or would bring people from other regions to facilitate in their event and showcase other communities.
Startup Weekend has been instrumental in developing thousands of entrepreneurial hubs all over the world and providing communities an opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship in all its different forms and a big generator of new startups, ideas and teams. Google for Startups, our main global sponsor, noticed this early on and decided to make a dedicated partnership with us to support such an important mission and increase access to our resources all over the world.
