FoundersForge is hosting its third year of Startup Mountain Summit from Nov. 6-8, at the Brinkley Center. The event is being sponsored by ETSU’s College of Business and Technology and will provide opportunities for founders across the nation, as well as specifically for students.
FoundersForge is a nonprofit entrepreneurial center based in Johnson City that supports startups nationwide. The executive director, David Nelson, is also a member of the CBAT faculty.
“Before the Summit existed, if you were an entrepreneur and wanted to access more resources, mentorship, a bigger network, you had to go to Nashville or out west or to one of these big conferences, many hours away from our region,” Nelson said. “And we knew that if we pulled people from all across the country and brought them to a place as beautiful and amazing as ours, that they would come as long as we offered a really good experience, great speakers and just a different energy that you wouldn’t normally have at a conference.”
The Startup Mountain Summit will kick off on Thursday with The Pitch from 6-8 p.m. Six startups will compete for a chance to win $10,000.
“The Pitch was actually the first event we started doing before we were in FoundersForge. It was really the event that kind of kick-started our focus and support of the entrepreneur community in the region,” Nelson said.
CBAT also hosts an annual iBUCS Student Venture Pitch Competition, where students can pitch their business ideas and potentially further develop them to compete in the larger Summit Pitch. The next Student Pitch Competition will be in the spring semester on March 27.
In addition to competing in the Summit’s Pitch Competition with their ideas from iBUCS, students can also have a table to showcase their product or business idea at the Pitch Corner or the conference itself.
Friday and Saturday will both feature networking opportunities, workshops and 10 experienced speakers, including two local to the area.
Friday will have an especially unique experience called Adventure Networking, which will take place on ETSU’s ropes course.
“It was important to Sonu Mirchandani and I to make sure that students had a unique opportunity to go to something like this that normally cost would prevent them from doing,” Nelson said. “And we hope part of that experience is not just in learning and getting access and meeting the speakers, but it’s also that we will have a directory that goes live at the event and all the businesses that have open positions for internships will be listed, and so students can look, see who’s offering internships and reach out to them directly,” said Nelson.
The Startup Mountain Summit typically costs $150 for attendees, but to make the opportunity more accessible for students, a student discount is available for only $10.
“I’m hoping that people walk away with more of an understanding about how startups work and a lot of the corporate jargon used,” said Emma Ayala, marketing intern at FoundersForge and president of CBAT’s American Marketing Association. “So just learning, getting familiar with the language, getting familiar with how things work in the professional world, and just taking one thing from every speaker that was good, writing it down and implementing it into your career is probably what I would hope students do here.”
More information about the Startup Mountain Summit can be found at startupmountainsummit.com.
