Startups are hard.
We’ve all heard that adage before. But by sharing stories and lessons learned — including a few well-earned battle scars — we can make the entrepreneurial journey a little less turbulent. That will be the goal of a special event hosted January 22 at the Museum of History & Industry, part of our partnership around The Seattle 10 program.
For the past five years, we’ve worked with MOHAI to identify up-and-coming Seattle area startups, picking 10 Seattle area startups each year. The chosen startups recreate their business concepts on giant cocktail napkins, which are hung from the rafters at the GeekWire Gala, and entered into the permanent collection at MOHAI.
To celebrate the fifth year of the program, we’re hosting a special event at MOHAI on Jan. 22 from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. titled: Startup Seattle: Lessons Learned from the Seattle 10. Tickets — which cost $25 — are available here.
I’ll be moderating the discussion with an awesome panel of startup CEOs, all of whom are past Seattle 10 honorees:
- Chase Jarvis, the award-winning photographer, director and entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of CreativeLive (Seattle 10 class of 2013), the world’s largest online education platform for creatives and entrepreneurs with over 10 million students worldwide.
- Kristen Hamilton, the Onvia co-founder and former Microsoft executive who is currently the CEO and co-founder of Koru (Seattle 10 class of 2014), a leader in predictive hiring technologies.
- Avni Patel Thompson, who helped build consumer brands at P&G, BCG, Adidas and Starbucks prior to starting Seattle-based Poppy (Seattle 10 class of 2016), a Y Combinator- backed startup that’s looking to make lives easier for families by matching them to qualified childcare providers.
- Mike McSherry, a serial tech entrepreneur who has co-founded six tech companies, including BoostMobile and Swype, and now serves as CEO of Xealth (Seattle 10 class of 2017), a digital prescribing and analytics platform integrated into healthcare electronic medical records.
This is an amazing panel of entrepreneurs, and we’re thrilled that they’ll join us on stage on January 22 to share tips, lessons and a few war stories from the startup trenches. I’ve been working on some in-depth questions for the panel that dive into startups, innovation and Seattle’s role in the tech economy, but please come with your own questions as we’d like to make this an interactive and fun town hall discussion. See you on Jan. 22.
If you’re a GeekWire member (Startup, Gold, Super or Galactic pass holder), contact us at events@geekwire.com for special pricing.
