This post is an answer to some readers who complained that I only mentioned in the end of the last post that there were no more tickets available for LeWeb’11. Another suggestion is: watch LeWeb’11 online here. Or, if you are dying to meet young entrepreneurs in person, I strongly suggest LeWeb Student Warm-Up, a conference aimed at preparing students for LeWeb'11, taking place on Monday December 5th at ESCP Europe Business School.
Leweb’11 is to entrepreneurship what Soccerex, which is now taking place in Rio de Janeiro, is to football. E-commerce is booming in Brazil and the largest Latin American country will be on the spot during the event: Fernando Madeira is one of the main speakers and Fabrice Grinda, angel investor and Co-CEO of OLX, will give a speech about Angel Investing in Brazil.
LeWeb Student Warm-Up main speakers are Jeff Clavier, a famous VC investing in early stage startups in the Silicon Valley and Andrew Powers, founder and CEO of Pagelines, a drag and drop design platform on WordPress, who has bootstrapped his company with a small core team to grow the PageLines community to more than 400,000 free downloads and 16,000+ pro users.
According to Pierre-Simon Ntiruhungwa, co-founder of Silicon Students,, a community of student and freshly graduated tech entrepreneurs in France, “The conference aims to: prepare people for LeWeb, make them meet, and boost more multi-national student entrepreneurship initiatives. Representatives of student entrepreneurship organizations from outside of France will be invited on stage to present what they do." Indeed, such a world-class conference as LeWeb can be pretty intimidating for young students. Knowing other fellow students, from different countries, helps a lot in order to make the most of this event. Another goal of the conference is to build relationship with fellow entrepeneurs who might be working in similar project. Florian Leblanc, the other co-founder of Silicon Students, adds "We are all trying to do more or less the same thing in terms of student entrepreneurship but the problem is that we don't even know what others are doing in our neighboring countries. The consequence is that, most of the times, we're trying to reinvent the wheel whereas it could have been more efficient to continue an existing project and join forces with people from other countries."
The conference will be live-streamed at www.siliconstudents.com
And for those who are lucky enough to be in Paris on Monday December 5th, there are still tickets available here.
In France, there is no such a thing as a well-established student entrepreneur community yet. Silicon Students wants to be the pioneer organizer of this niche market by gathering students through events around entrepreneurs in schools and making the students connected through Facebook groups. The international aspect is an important part of the project as they have series of video-interviews made by their members in the Silicon Valley.
Startup Weekend, which is backed by Google and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was founded in the Silicon Valley and organized a successful (and crowded) weekend in Paris. Apéro entrepreneurs also organizes events for the entrepreneur community in Paris; it consists of gatherings every first Thursday of the month in a bar. It started on February 2010 and is now present in 20 cities.
In Brazil, where Startup Weekend has also done some successful events, the most important entrepreneurship gatherings are organized by Sebrae. They occur in different cities during the entire year. The schedule can be seem here.
What motivate people to attend such events? The will to become the next Schmidt or Fernando Madeira or the will to meet one of them? Do you think Jobs or Gates attended such events before they became speakers?
