Startup Weekend is awesome. It’s the sort of dream initiative business growth organisations would love to generate themselves – if it hadn’t already been invented! So we simply did the next best thing and got stuck into it ourselves. Grow Wellington and Creative HQ have backed Wellington Startup Weekend twice now, and Nick from Creative HQ has been to two in Auckland, one as a participant and one as a mentor. Addict? It’s starting to look like it.

This year’s Startup Weekend in Wellington will be better again, and we’ve been helping pull it together alongside team members from Hyperstart, Bizdojo and iwantmyname. We’re looking forward to hosting the out-of-towners and putting together another scintillating hive of startup activity. The elements of Startup Weekend – teamwork, pressure and mentoring – are also exactly what we ourselves strive for in developing our local entrepreneurial ecosystem here in Wellington, backing startups and SMEs to do it bigger, better faster. It’s exciting to squish it all into a room over 54 hours.

Look out for Nick Churchouse and Karen Bender this Startup Weekend, we’ll be sweeping up and bringing you pizza and stuff. A bunch of the Creative HQ team is stepping in to help with pitches and judging too. Have a great time, work yourself into a frenzy and drive home a slam dunk startup pitch on Sunday night.

We exist in the Tweetosphere as @CreativeHQ and @GrowWelly, another way to keep abreast of how we play in the local business space.

If your Startup Weekend takes you somewhere you want to stay, we’d love to hear from you. Good luck for the weekend!