Trinity's Entrepreneurial Society (TES) runs a weekend called Startup Weekend during the first semester of each academic year. The weekend is dedicated to educating students on the ideation, development, and pitching elements of creating startup’s.
The weekend is runs across three days, Friday till Sunday, and each day focuses on one of the three previously mentioned elements.
Fridays session is in the evening, and participants are welcomed with a quick presentation about what current global entrepreneurial space looks like. Examples of exciting startup’s and industries which are taking off are highlighted. Students will then be placed into groups and asked to ideate about a potential businesses. By the end of the evening a number of startup ideas will have been created, these are highlighted in the seminar and then are made available for anyone to request to join each individual startup. The founder of the idea now has the task of choosing their team. By the end of this day everyone should have an idea and a group.
Saturday’s session takes up the entire day and involves industry experts from successful startup’s coming in and giving talks on how to best develop an idea and turn it into a fully fleshed out plan. This will be followed by talks about how best to pitch to investors, along with an example pitch.
The Sunday session will involve each group pitching to a group of venture capitalists, this is the final stage. Once all groups have pitched a winning group will be announced. The decision is based on three key areas: the innovativeness of the idea, the scalability of the business plan, and the strength of the pitch.
The weekend is a lot of fun, and provides participants an inclusive space to engage in entrepreneurship without prior need of an idea.