Minnespark: micro seed capital for (very) early stage Minnesota startup

by philcrissman • 16 years ago

27 10 16 years ago

100k3• 16 years ago

Hey, awesome. We made Hacker News.

I'm involved in organizing this. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know and I'll respond and if necessary add them to the FAQ: http://minnestar.org/minnespark/faq/

sachinag• 16 years ago

Is this more Awesome Foundation, where it's $1,000 to just build something or is it a mini-YC where it's $1,000 to really do a company?

100k3• 16 years ago

I'd never heard of Awesome Foundation, sounds cool though.

Obviously $1K is not a lot of money to build a company, but the goal is to get people over the mental hurdles that are stopping them and hopefully get them to a place where they're making money online.

I'm a YC alumni so I'm influenced by that, but the idea is lifted from Scale Well in Chicago: http://scalewell.com/

The winner of the first Scale Well grant used it to refine his synthesizer, and he now sells Beep It on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=25223176

callahad• 16 years ago

Oh, neat! Is there much of a startup scene in the Cities? Where do folks meet up?

philcrissman• 16 years ago

That's a good question. A lot of places. I've met a lot of likeminded folks at Minnedemo/Minnebar events (see http://minnestar.org), and just through working/networking, and the local Ruby group (http://ruby.mn).

Tech.MN has a pretty thorough local event calendar: http://tech.mn/events/

One group that seems to be gaining momentum is a newish MN Lean Startup group. http://leanstartup.mn/

But yeah, there are many great people here doing many cool things.

Would love to see posts about folks in other cities doing or trying similar things. Silicon Valley is great and all, but not everyone wants or even needs to be there. I'm sure the Twin Cities is not the only place with a lot of enthusiastic folks creating the tech culture they want to see around them...

johns• 16 years ago

+1 Minnedemo is probably the best networking event for startups in the cities

varikin• 16 years ago

There are a bunch of other active user groups in the Cities too. Python, Cocoa, mobile dev, groovy and many others.

Minnespark: micro seed capital for (very) early stage Minnesota startup

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