Kiwi Landing Pad is offering a fantastic prize package at Wellington Startup Weekend. KLP CEO and the founder of Sonar 6 John Holt talks about how the new venture is assisting our Start-ups in the United States.

Building a business at any stage is hard work. Starting a business from nothing and growing it to the point where lots of others can help you keep growing it is even harder! Startup Weekend reminds me of the early days of co-founding Sonar6 – three entrepreneurial people committed to finding a viable startup idea no matter what. It’s a fantastic event and no doubt if we had kicked it all off at Startup Weekend, we would have been able to get more perspective and maybe some other people to come on the journey earlier, accelerated our plans and maybe made less mistakes.

Kiwi Landing Pad was founded on the principle of supporting the same type of organic acceleration, but in the Startup Capital of the world – San Francisco, USA. It brings together the belief and financial commitment of successful New Zealand and US entrepreneurs as well as the NZ government through the Ministry of Science and Innovation. KLP is located in Startup House – a massive 220 desk facility in the middle of the SoMA district, now home to Twitter, Zynga, Pinterest, Salesforce.com, Square and literally hundreds of others. We provide office facilities and access to a range of resources through our growing network of contacts built over the last 15 years.

Currently 15 Kiwi companies reside at KLP ranging from the huge, ( e.g Xero ) on the way to being huge, ( e.g Vend ) to the just getting started ( e.g Transcribeme ) but what links them all is their ability to have obtained the resources to make a decent start – capital, great people and early customer traction. But challenges exist in abundance to get to this level of readiness in New Zealand, so we recently launched Project Catapult with the objective of flinging aspiring Kiwi tech entrepreneurs into the heart of the action early to better validate their ideas and learn more about what it takes to succeed against the rest of the startup world.

Kiwi Landing Pad is offering a special Catapult prize package, here are the details:

• Airfare & accommodation in San Francisco for one person, plus a Kiwi Landing Pad hot desk for 4 weeks.
• Awarded entirely at judges discretion to the team whose business could best scale rapidly into the U.S. market.

We are delighted to support Startup Weekend by offering the opportunity for participants to actually experience KLP and the Catapult programme for themselves and we look forward to being part of such an exciting and influential piece of New Zealand’s start-up ecosystem.