The Joker once said “madness is a lot like gravity, all it takes is a little push,” and as we like to equate “madness” with “startups” – we decided to create H3.
Last week we held our first H3 event – something we’ve been planning for awhile but just never had the time to put together: put programmers, designers and product people into a room, mix with drinks and pizza and see what happens!
Any success that StartupsHK has had over the past few years, in terms of events and networking mixers, is really because of the amazing people that are inside the community. We feel extremely blessed to be part of this community and even from our Startup Saturday event in October to the H3 last week we know Hong Kong is going on the map because of YOU!
If you missed it, H3 is our new mixer event where if you are a hacker, hustler or hipster you can attend – and usually you are without a team – you are a designer looking to join a new startup, a hustler with a great idea or a hacker that is looking to put his/her talent into a new company – each one of these people are essential to the success of a startup and the point of H3 is to form new startups over the course of the evening with only color stickers to let you know what the other people specialize in.
We thank SupersonicAds for buying the pizza and drinks and to SoftLayer, Wynd, General Assembly and eMarsys for giving out prizes to any team that formed that night with great start up resources like free hosting for a year, free office space for a month, free tech education courses and even 5 mentor sessions with the managing director of a big e-marketing company!
So, armed with some cool stuff we hoped people would show up – and we’re so happy to announce 100+ people showed up and we formed at least 1 team that night that had a hacker, hustler and hipster, with others still circling each other and more will probably form over the next few weeks.
We think this shows that Hong Kong has grown quite a bit since we started in 2010, and that the startup bug has bitten a lot of people. Almost everyone that attended were new faces and some didn’t even know what StartupsHK was – and that they were looking for people to work with and that it was hard to find them at typical networking events.
We’re planning the next one for January 2014 now and will continue H3 as bi-monthly events and we’ll bring back the teams that formed to show off what they are doing.
Again, we want to stress that YOU are helping to make the community super strong – we’re rivalling what’s been seen in San Francisco, so keep on going, Hong Kong!
We’d love to hear from you how to make the event better and also what’s next? We’re thinking for every three H3 events we’ll do 1 pitch event so that the teams that have formed can get a chance to show off what they’ve been building – but please feel free to drop a comment below.
