Milan Startup Weekend

Last weekend Mind the Bridge participated as a sponsor to Milan Startup Weekend (Website), a Kauffman Foundation initiative that takes place in the most important cities around the world.  Held and organized by Talent Garden together with Startupbusiness and Frontiers Conferences, the event saw the participation of more than 130 people among students, researchers, wanna-be entrepreneurs, investors…. and yes, some curious folks too.

As a representative of Mind the Bridge, I have been invited to be part of the jury for selecting the winner of a free seat @MTB Startup School (our prize), a 3-week program held at our premises in San Francisco.

Time flew by so fast that, it felt like a heartbeat from the time we got there and  the final presentations. You could see the excitement, passion and tiredness in the eyes of the speakers (after 54hrs of non-stop working), but despite that they did overall a great job. Among others, we found a project called Keep my stuff, composed by 17 years old kids and their professor really stood out. Outstanding presentation: the speaker (17) was evidently more effective and communicative than the previous ones. Needless to say, they got a big round of applause… and they won Startup Weekend.

We selected SiliconOcean as the winner of the MTB prize, a web professional network  inspired to the collaborative and interconnected model of Silicon Valley that allows people to join startup projects and create working teams (right, now you know why we select them:)). We liked the attitude and the passion of their team members.
In particular, we awarded two young guys who participated in the development of the concept, Jonathan Di Paola and Sebastian Nanic.

While they are only 19 years old,  they have a clear goal in mind: they have “a hunger to learn” and want to “build a product that can change the world“.

We saw and interviewed 30+ people interested in flying to San Francisco and attending our Startup School. However, only a very few of them have shown the passion, the character and the attitude needed to cross the ocean and go the extra mile.

Jonathan and Sebastian have that fire that we are looking for.

I’m not quite sure whether their innovation will change the world or not. But we do believe we are on the right path if we can contribute to educate the next wave of entrepreneurs, makers and innovation leaders.

Simona