A five-day conference for startups and Denver entrepreneurs was reimagined this year with a shorter blast of organized content and an option that allows community members to plan and attend their own gatherings.
Denver Startup Week began Tuesday afternoon with a kickoff keynote speech and wraps up by Thursday evening, cutting the organizers' official gatherings at the 13th annual event to just 2.5 days this year.
The events in the startup week's community track run all week. Participants have seized the opportunity to plan meetups at Denver parks, coffee shops and beer gardens for everything from networking to boot camps on sales and sustainability, organizers said.
In addition over 70 sessions planned by organizers, there are over 170 community-planned gatherings around the city, said Kate Barton, chief of external affairs and managing director at the Downtown Denver Partnership, which helps to host event.
"Our goal has always been to showcase what's happening in downtown and in the broader region," Barton said. "This is really going back to the ethos of Startup Week, which is for the community, by the community."
The event is lower-profile than the pre-pandemic tech startup weeks held in Denver. Those events filled weekdays with a combination of organizer-led events and community organized workshops, panel discussions and parties held at company offices and venues across downtown each September during the city's tech startup boom.
Erik Mitisek, a Denver entrepreneur who co-founded Denver Startup Week, said the change this year came about from a "laser-focus" on accessibility. He said post-pandemic work and driving habits prompted organizers to condense the schedule so that it doesn't require a commitment to five full days downtown.
At the direction of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, the city's inaugural artificial intelligence conference, the DenAI Summit, is happening at the same time as startup week, Mitisek said. That event is an effort to bring public and private entities together to discuss the use of AI "to solve hard social problems," event organizers said.
The one-day DenAI Summit conference is on Thursday and brings two major speakers shared by both events: Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and chairman of Google, Mitisek said. Attendees who want to see those speakers must register for the DenAI Summit unless they are among the 500 startup week registered attendees for whom places have been reserved. Registration for the summit has sold out, according to the event webpage.
Mitisek said this year's Startup Week again has a natural inclination toward "all things AI" and quantum technology.
"A lot of the content is focused on this huge movement around AI and generative AI," he said.
The remainder of Startup Week is still open for attendance and is free to attend, Mitisek said.
The official programming is scheduled across four different venues downtown, Barton said, with the McNichols building at Civic Center Park serving as event headquarters. Organizers put the content into four tracks main tracks that they call Ignite, Grow, Operate, and Create.
"We really tried to streamline and curate so that the energy was meeting people where they are," Barton said.
