Longmont joins startup week crowd

LONGMONT – Forget startup week. Spring is quickly becoming startup season in Boulder County and Northern Colorado.

Organizers in Longmont have set June 1-5 as the dates for the inaugural Longmont Startup Week, a series of events aimed at highlighting the city’s entrepreneurial scene.

LSW15 comes one year after Fort Collins hosted its first startup week last year. Boulder, the first city to host what has now become a national phenomenon, will host its sixth startup week this year. Boulder’s is slated for May 11-15, with Fort Collins hosting May 26-31.

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Just as Fort Collins held its events the week after Boulder’s last year, Longmont organizers decided to do the same this year by placing their dates adjacent to the Fort Collins week to “hopefully draft off of people who might be attending that event and spill over,” LSW15’s Jennifer Ferguson said.

Ferguson, who works in sales and marketing for Xseed Design Video Production, is overseeing the organization of LSW15 this year. But the idea for the event spun out of a Startup Longmont Meetup group that began last fall. The idea was to get the word out about the entrepreneurial things going on in Longmont.

“There’s so many people who just don’t know,” Ferguson said. “So that’s why we decided to put our focus there first.”

Organizers are still in the early stages of figuring out how many and what events they’ll host, though Ferguson said there could be as many as 10 events per day held around town. Ferguson is aiming to bring a national keynote speaker to town for opening day.

She said the hope is that the week can be put on for about $50,000, money that would come mostly from local business sponsors. Ferguson said the city, the Longmont Area Economic Council and Visit Longmont are all already on board with support.

Two Longmont entities that will be heavily involved are TinkerMill, a makerspace started by Scott Converse, and Launch Longmont, a co-working space started by Terry Gold that opened its doors in late December in the former Times-Call newspaper’s building downtown. Both figure to be hubs of activity during the week. Gold said Launch Longmont is planning to sponsor and host a launch party to kick the week off.

All events will be free and open to the public, and Gold said he’s hoping to see a wide cross-section of Longmont’s population attend, even those for whom launching a startup might be far from their minds.

“The startup community in Longmont is really starting to happen,” Gold said. “I think our startup week will be unique and focused on what Longmont’s about and not just another startup week.”