From Apr. 4-9 various locations around New York hosted this year’s startup week. Aiming to celebrate technology, design, and entrepreneurship, the New York Startup Week (NYSW) is hosted by club Tech@NYU and is a week long conference consisting of workshops, demo-days, and a keynote speech by the CEO of an NYC start-up. The event provides students with an opportunity to learn from the best in New York City’s tech scene. This year’s event was supported and sponsored by several tech giants and companies including Dev Bootcamp, Microsoft, Tumblr, and Clarifi. Tech@NYU is NYC’s largest student-run organization of hackers, designers, and builders, and provides students with the platform to gain skills and engage in activities related to the tech and design industry. Founded in 2009 with an aim to “connect technical and non-technical NYU students interested in building technology startups,” the club hosts events throughout the year to help students develop skills-- such as Hack Days and Design Days-- along with other events during the year, which allow students to build technology and socialize. On Mar. 31, Tech@NYU announced their first IPO.“Startup Week has existed since Tech@NYU’s inception in 2009 because our founders recognized that there was a need to get students more excited and plugged into the startup ecosystem,” commented Tech@NYU President Terri Burns. “The two most important things that attendees can gain from this experience are 1) Knowledge about something (anything!) pertaining to technology and entrepreneurship, and 2) More information about how to get more plugged into the student tech community. While Tech@NYU regularly hosts events, Startup Week is unique in that it allows students who may be interested in various facets of technology to spend time together over a period of a week, which is great for building community.” This year’s calendar was designed to include a wide variety of events, including workshops for web scraping and automating tasks; “The Diversity Panel” where professionals in will discuss their personal experiences with the lack of diversity in the tech industry; and “CEO Talks,” where ten students had the opportunity to sit down with the CEOs of a start-up and ask questions about the experience. The event also included April Startup Week Demo Days where NYC students were provided with a platform to demonstrate their projects. This year’s DemoDays event was held at the Tumblr headquarters in New York, and is believed to be the most successful event of the week. Moreover, this year’s SW’s keynote speaker will be Steven van Wel, the CEO of Karma. The event was held at the Microsoft NYC headquarters. “This year’s Startup Week was a success. Though there was definitely some variability in our event attendance, every single event had a solid number of people come, our speakers were incredible, and people had a lot of fun,” added Burns. When asked about how this year’s event was different from those previously hosted, Burns commented, “In the past, we’ve ironically allowed for all types of tech companies, and not just startups, to participate in the festivities. This year, we decided to focus more on smaller startups, and so this year’s Startup Week really emphasizes and highlights the robust, diverse, startups that are in the city. I think that staying true to the startup community is something that’s really exciting and a great improvement.” New to the event was also the internal RSVP system, a software created by Tech@NYU’s infrastructure team.

This article was written by Lathika Chandra Mouli. Please send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Tech @ NYU via Facebook