Startup Weekend in Hong Kong

This past weekend was the 3rd Startup Weekend in Hong Kong and I was lucky enough to return again as a judge. This year it was huge with 14 teams competing!

As usual, I was very impressed by the ideas, hard work, and execution. They stared on Friday night with lots of pitches and team formation. The group worked all day Saturday and Sunday at the CoCoon co-working space in Hong Kong (the same co-work space AcceleratorHK is using). A few AcceleratorHK cohort members as well as program director Paul Orlando were helping out as mentors.

On Sunday night we all gathered to a different venue where we heard all of the 14 pitches. Myself and four other esteemed judges listened to the 5 minute presentations and lead the 3 minute Q&A session.

The teams came from all walks of life as well as had ideas and teams that were in a variety of domains including: social, conference networking, kitchen rental, shopping, car sharing, film location scouting, and creative ways to use your free time. After the deliberation, which was close, we choose “FilmScout” as the winner. FilmScout was a team that built a solution for filmmakers and film students to find film locations to shoot in. While a niche market, they were a 100% solution to a market segment and demonstrated that they followed the Customer Development process over the course of the competition (which accounts for 1/3 of the judging criteria).

After the event there was some networking and I was interviewed on local Hong Kong TV about the startup scene in Hong Kong, AcceleratorHK, and of course my role as a judge in Startup Weekend.