Upcoming Beijing Startup Events

This month, there are two interesting startup events happening…  On the same weekend.

iWeekend Beijing bills itself as “a unique experience that brings together technology entrepreneurs and professionals with diverse talents to select an idea, develop the product, and launch a technology-based startup in just one weekend!”  It’s organized by a few of my friends from coworking, with help from the larger iWeekend organization.  iWeekend events have typically been held in Europe before, so they have a history with organizing an international group.  I’m going to be attending this one because it was announced first and my friends are organizing it.

Startup Weekend Beijing is essentially the same thing, actually.  I believe their roots are based more in the US, however.  If I weren’t going to iWeekend on the same weekend, I would definitely check it out.

A new place to work

On Tuesday, I went to a networking event with Geeks on a Plane, who were visiting Beijing at the time. One of them, Mike Prasad, and I were talking about the startup community in Beijing and I mentioned that it was actually really nice to have the Geeks in town, because I also ended meeting other local entrepreneurs. I mentioned that there aren’t quite as many places and events for startups as there are in places like Silicon Valley.

Mike mentioned that Los Angeles didn’t have much community either a few years ago, but that he and some like-minded people got together to really push it. After enough time, they reached a critical mass and now the community is pretty lively even without them organizing everything. He encouraged me to do the same thing here.