Whether you’re a rookie entrepreneur looking for mentorship, or a seasoned startup veteran searching for the next hire, Startup Grind is a pretty good place to start.
For the uninitiated, Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire and connect entrepreneurs. It bills itself as the “largest independent startup community” in the world, bringing together more than 400,000 entrepreneurs in over 200 cities.
Startup Grind places great emphasis on face-time.
The anchor of the organization is its monthly events, which feature local founders, innovators, educators and investors. These startup leaders share lessons learned on the path to building some of the most successful companies in tech via fireside chats with attendees.
The Boston chapter of Startup Grind is run by Carlos Cardenas, vice president at THE MEME, a strategic design consultancy that helps organizations discover opportunities for growth and innovation by developing human-centered interactive product and service experiences.
Cardenas (pictured right) said he was inspired to apply for the job of director in Boston when he wanted to host an event for the local startup community.
“Startup Grind favors bringing high-quality speakers together,” Cardenas said. “The format creates an experience of intimate dialogue with really interesting entrepreneurs and investors.”
At a Boston event held this November, Jamie Goldstein, founder at Pillar, a new founder-friendly VC fund in Boston, spoke about how he organized a team of 16 world-class CEOs from Boston's most well-known tech companies like Wayfair, Rapid7, TripAdvisor and DraftKings. Goldstein’s vision is to change the traditional venture capital structure to better align a fair and transparent relationship between founders and investors.
Other notable Boston speakers in the past have included serial entrepreneur David Cancel, Crashlytics founder Wayne Change and Diane Hessan, the former CEO of Startup Institute.
Speakers at the upcoming global conference (held from February 21-22 in Silicon Valley) include Noam Bardin of Waze; Sean Rad of Tinder; Nicole Sanchez of GitHub; and hometown heroes Jason Robins of Draftkings and TJ Parker of PillPack.
Though Startup Grind was founded in Silicon Valley in 2010, it has expanded to 85 countries. Chapters have popped up in over 200 cities, which host their own local events roughly once per month. Some of Startup Grind’s partnerships with media and major organizations like Google for Entrepreneurs have helped the community grow exponentially; to date, Startup Grind has hosted over 2,000 fireside chats around the world.
“For people interested in starting their own companies or investment firms, they can come learn from each other and talk to investors,” Cardenas said. “It could be someone who just started an amazing investment fund or a new startup — there’s all walks of life.”
Cardenas added that there are opportunities for networking before and after each event.
“We’re a very open-ended, community-building environment,” Cardenas said. “We help people network.”
Photos via social media
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