LAUNCH Conference
| Key people | Jason Calacanis |
|---|
The LAUNCH Festival was created by Jason Calacanis. The Festival now averages 10,000 attendees per year and features a few dozen speakers well known in the start up world. Past headliners have included Mark Cuban, Paul Graham, Evan Williams, and Yves Behar. During the festival, 50 start ups are revealed and "launch" at the event. The entrants compete in front of a select panel of judges for $100,000 in investment. Winners of the competition have also received investment from the LAUNCH Fund, such as Connect, which received $250,000 from the fund after they won the 2014 competition. Other key LAUNCH Festival competition alumni include Fitbit, Dropbox and Yammer.
The 2016 conference was held March 2-4 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The Hackathon started the previous weekend on February 26-28. Fifteen winners were selected including Cafe X, the Best Overall winner and Betagig, the Best Hackathon winner.
Although it is legally unrelated to the TechCrunch40 and TechCrunch50 events, it has been perceived as the natural evolution of those events citing Calacanis' involvement, and then split, from Michael Arrington and the TechCrunch series of events. The premise of the Launch Conference was to create the "most affordable, high-end technology event in the world.".
In the Pitch Competition, around 50 startups are allotted 4 minutes each to pitch their product on the main stage. There is a Grand Jury of judges that selects the winners in each category after watching their pitches. Beginning in 2015, the Festival abandoned its 1.0 and 2.0 categories to focus entirely on brand new companies, many of which had never even had an online presence prior to launching at the Festival.
Each year, a Hackathon is kicked off the weekend prior to the Festival. At the Hackathon, around 200 teams of 4 members spend the weekend building a product which competes for a chance to enter the LAUNCH Festival competition. 5 teams are selected from the 200 for the final chance to get the $100,000 grand prize.
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