February 6th, 2024
5pm - 9pm
Startup Bootcamp 101 - How To Determine If Your Concept is Good Enough?
In this intimate, hands-on workshop we invite a group of no more than 12 prospective startup founders to sound off their ideas to some highly experienced serial entrepreneurs, business mentors and a startup lawyer with an MBA, as well as their peers in the room. Participation in this workshop is conditional on everyone signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) upon entering the classroom, so everyone can freely share their ideas.
At this point in the economic cycle, we are seeing a record number of people ready to suspend their fruitless job search, and finally launch that startup they’ve been thinking about for a long time. If this sounds like you then this workshop is a golden opportunity to find out if your idea is ready for prime time. The good news is that by the time the economy recovers and money is ready to come off the sidelines again, your business plan will hopefully be ready for prime time fundraising.
The worst thing that can happen in this workshop is that you may come to the conclusion that you need to go back to the drawing board; the best is that you may garner a lot of useful feedback to hone your concept into a viable, fundable business, while gaining valuable introductions to potential co-founders, partners and investors.
You will walk away from this workshop with a tried and true PowerPoint template for creating a business plan that can successfully raise capital, and a good deal of legal advice specific to your startup that can save you thousands of dollars in setup costs should you proceed to Startup Bootcamp 201.
Meet Your Instructors:
Ron Wiener
CEO Venture Mechanics, 9-time serial entrepreneur
Ron Wiener is a startup CEO career spanning nearly four decades, Ron has founded and run nine investor-backed technology companies, with multiple successful exits. His technical background includes software/internet, electronics and mechanical engineering, as well as extensive global manufacturing experience. A named inventor on more than a dozen patents, he also brings deep expertise in D2C and D2B digital marketing and global strategic partnership development. He has been an angel investor and board member in numerous companies, and has operated four separate startup incubators, in PDX and SEA, since 2000. Ron starred in the first season of Startup Junkies in 2008, and is a widely published author in aviation, ergonomics and entrepreneurship. He also occasionally consults to early stage venture funds and hedge funds, as well as to start-ups and new business divisions that are spinning up or spinning out. He has been an avid pilot since 1984, is a gourmet chef, and addicted chess player.
Brooks Lindsay
LightLegal.com, startup attorney and MBA
Brooks Lindsay is the Founding Attorney of Light Legal PLLC, a lean law firm for high-growth startups. He is a corporate and commercial-contracts attorney who uses his experience as an entrepreneur, and education with a JD/MBA, to help other founders and business leaders thrive. He is experienced in entity formations, general corporate, fundraising and securities, commercial contract drafting and negotiations, tech transactions, IP, M&A, and other common legal issues facing ambitious founders. He provides superior outside general counsel by taking a multidisciplinary approach and quarterbacking across a spectrum of common startup legal needs. Brooks received his JD/MBA from the University of Washington and his undergraduate degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
Evan Poncelet
CEO/Executive Director - Washington State Black Angel Network
Evan Poncelet is the founder of the Washington State Black Angel Network, an emerging Angel investor syndicate geared towards accelerating and proliferating startup and startup funding culture in underserved communities. He is a Seattle Angel Conference and Decile Group Venture Institute alumnus in addition to having spent 12+ years in the software industry as a developer and program manager working on everything from embedded systems to cloud/SaaS. He is the current director of information technology and technologist in residence for the Africatown Community Land Trust and sits on the Black Community Advisory Board for the UW school of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. When he isn’t in Seattle working on closing the wealth gap via building on-ramps to the STEM economy, entrepreneurship, and investing, he is working in/on his aquaponics greenhouse, electronics lab, or metal fabrication shop at his hacker-compound in Silicon Valley and spending time with friends & family before the eventual release of The Elder Scrolls VI which has lived rent-free in his head since he got a VR mod of Skyrim for his Valve Index to get through the pandemic.