Boston Startup School readies to wrap up first program with "Exposé" recruiting event Wednesday
Boston Startup School, a six-week program designed to transform recent college grads into high-impact hires for startup companies, is wrapping up on Wednesday morning with a match-making event it calls "Exposé." On stage, there will be 72 participants delivering one-minute summaries of their qualifications — and in the audience, there will be 84 companies hoping to land them. Not a bad candidate-to-recruiter ratio...
Registration for the event closed last week, says Aaron O'Hearn, one of the organizers of Boston Startup School. The companies who'll be present range from publicly-traded businesses like Constant Contact, Brightcove, and TripAdvisor to earlier-stage startups like Fiksu, YesWare, and Crashlytics. Many of the smaller companies, O'Hearn says, "typically don't have resources to recruit talented, junior people."
Participants in Startup School have chosen to spend their six weeks focusing on either marketing, business development and sales, product design, or software development. (I wrote about the plans for Startup School back in February.)
"The idea behind the pitches is for each student to quickly explain what they can do for a company, show evidence backing that up, then explain what they are passionate about/looking for," O'Hearn writes via e-mail. "Not all the pitches are the same. We've encouraged folks to follow a story line but be creative. Some are showing, some are telling, others teaching and engaging the audience in unique ways." (A few examples of participants' online profiles and school projects are below.)
The event happens Wednesday morning. It concludes with lunch and networking.
Boston Startup School is something of a spin-out from the TechStars Boston accelerator program and Project 11, an investment firm co-founded by TechStars Boston director Katie Rae. It is free to participants, and this year was headquartered at the Harvard Innovation Lab.
Some examples of student projects and profiles:
- Nicki Haylon, a Roger Williams University grad, was part of the marketing track- Bart Flaherty, a Northeastern alum, focused on software development
- Michael Tsidulko, a graduate of William and Mary, was part of the business development track
- Alexander Lynn, an alum of Concordia University, focused on product and design
And here are two student-run blogs: Inside Boston Startup School and Growth Ninja.
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About Scott Kirsner Scott Kirsner was part of the team that launched Boston.com in 1995, and has been writing a column for the Globe since 2000. His work has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and Variety. Scott is also the author of the books "Fans, Friends & Followers" and "Inventing the Movies," was the editor of "The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England," and was a contributor to "The Good City: Writers Explore 21st Century Boston." Scott also helps organize several local events on entrepreneurship, including the Nantucket Conference and Future Forward. Here's some background on how Scott decides what to cover, and how to pitch him a story idea.
Events
May 16 & 17: Convergence Forum on Life Sciences
Speakers from Bristol-Myers, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Biogen Idec talk about the next ten years of the biopharma business. Plus, journalist David Ewing Duncan on radical life extension. (I'm hosting.)
May 22: MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
Chief information officers from Guess, Haemonetics, Intel and other companies talk discuss "architecting the enterprise of the future."
June 25: TEDxBoston
The oldest and biggest of the locally-organized TED events is back, at the Seaport World Trade Center. Tickets are free, but tough to get. Also streams on the web and airs on WBUR.