Entrepreneurs are coming together this week for Denver Startup Week, the city’s annual startup conference.
This year’s event is a little different from years past. Organizers are leaning on people from the startup community to plan their own meetings at venues around the city and condensing the timeline for official gatherings.
Steven Flutie-Davis, the founder and CEO of pitch sink, a company that focuses on developing medical technology devices, said there’s still plenty to do, regardless of who is hosting any particular event.
“It’s just a great opportunity to network and meet more people,” Flutie-Davis said during an interview on the sidelines of a panel discussion about technology companies held at a Capital One Café. “The amount of information you can learn from these other people is phenomenal. I’m going from this… to learning about seed investments, growth investments, then a VC mixer.”
This is the first year Flutie-Davis is attending the event, even though he’s lived in Denver for five years. That’s because his company is only 6 months old.
“We’re in stealth mode right now, so we’re getting ready to come out of it,” he said. “We bootstrapped the whole thing. It’s been kind of all grown based off of organic networking. That's why I was really excited about what this event is.”
Denver Startup Week launched in 2012. This year, event organizers are hosting 70 events, with an additional 170 meetings planned throughout the city, according to Kate Barton, the chief of external affairs for the Downtown Denver Partnership. The new format was intended to “amplify the energy in a few core locations,” she said.
Denver Startup Week continues through Friday, Sept. 20.
