Have A New Business Idea? ACBJ, Global Silicon Valley Launch Free Startup Bootcamp
Source: Sacramento Business Journal, Cromwell Schubarth
Photo: Startup Bootcamp runs from July 20 to Aug. 31. (GSV)
Fresh off of launching an online MBA program for entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley veteran and Global Silicon Valley founder Michael Moe is ready to cast his net wider.
“Live Aid for Entrepreneurs” is how Moe describes an idea that he came up with on a restless night during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There are 40 million people out of work right now. There are students who had a ‘virtual graduation’ this spring and are entering a job market that doesn’t exist. On top of that we have all of this racial and civil unrest,” Moe said. “It struck me that America is on its back and entrepreneurs fix things.”
GSV and American City Business Journals — the parent company behind this publication and 43 others around the country — are partnering on a free seven-week “Startup Bootcamp” that’s designed to train a new entrepreneurial army to help restart the national economy. The program begins July 20th and concludes August 31st (Register at the site gsvbootcamp.com).
It’s built on the experience Moe and GSV have applied to build a $25,000 MBA program this year at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, and in years before that of running accelerator programs and corporate entrepreneurship training around the country.
“A majority of college students say they want to work for a startup and there are people who have been let go who have always wondered what it would be like to be their own boss,” Moe said. “That’s who this program is for.”
The “Live Aid for Entrepreneurs” tagline came from Moe rewatching the “Bohemian Rhapsody” biopic about Queen’s Freddie Mercury.
“It started and ended with the Live Aid concert, where Queen and other performers raised money for starving people,” Moe said, referring to the musical event in July 1985 that drew attention to famine in Ethiopia. “So I thought, that’s what we need, to ignite a new entrepreneurship movement.”
Startup Bootcamp is open to anybody willing to enlist for six weeks of online lessons taught by experts in key areas, including how to identify an opportunity, build a product and a brand. It will all be done virtually, in both large and small groups before culminating in a Demo Day where survivors get to make their pitch to investors in week seven.
“Our small groups will happen three days each week and be arranged by geography, by industry and by affinity,” Moe said. “You can choose to be in none of them or three of them. You could be in one group from Silicon Valley and another that is interested in artificial intelligence and maybe another one made up of women entrepreneurs.”
The Demo Day will be similarly organized so that investors can concentrate on what they are looking for. These will combine three-minute recorded pitches with live interaction.
Among the partners supporting the GSV-ACBJ program is Microsoft. Anthony Salcito, vice president for education for the Redmond, Washington-based technology giant, said in a statement that “Microsoft is proud to support new businesses and helping all embrace an entrepreneurial mindset and leverage technology to accelerate. Given current times building ideas to help society, stimulate jobs and provide innovation is more needed than ever before.”
Moe emerged as a celebrated tech analyst during the dot-com era and over the years invested in megahits that include Facebook, Twitter and Spotify. When he launched his MBA program in May, he said he wanted to democratize the opportunity to be an entrepreneur.
“This is an extension of that, opening it up to everybody at a time that I think it is really needed,” Moe said. “It combines something that I stress that sounds like that line from the song, ‘Old MacDonald” — E-I-E-I-O. That stands for entrepreneurship, innovation, education, impact and opportunity.”
“That’s what this Startup Bootcamp is all about,” he added.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2020/07/13/startup-bootcamp-with-michael-moe