Building a startup is not easy. The Startup Jackpot team, as fellow entrepreneurs, knows this all too well. We have struggled with it all –from team building to fundraising to acquiring customers and everything in between.
This event is all about celebrating our hard work, supporting the local startup community, and winning no-strings-attached cash through a unique startup competition.
Mr. Bill Cromie co-founded and serves as President of Headliner.fm Corp. Mr. Cromie Co-founded Nabbr.com Corp. in 2007 and serves as its Chief Technology Officer. He has over 10 years of software development experience, having started programming while still in high school. He designed software systems for the real estate development market. He is a graduate of NYU.
Thor builds companies with Fortune 100s and family offices. Previously in healthcare (Audax), social games (Zynga), and a variety of other fields. First startup was a mobile gaming company in 2001.
Jason White has been a Serial Entrepreneur for the past 20 years. His prior ventures include Moola.com, a patented social gaming model which combined multi-player gaming, sweepstakes and video advertising (sold in 2008), 3Genius International, a network of hotel reservations websites which have sold in excess of $140M in hotel reservations to date (sold 2008), and HumanityCalls.org, a 501(c)3 seed capitalized by eBay, which used game mechanics to raise awareness for hundreds of large and small environmental charities. White's latest venture is Blocksy.com, a next generation real estate portal for New York home buyers and apartment hunters, and for local real estate professionals and brokerages. Blocksy recently reached 1 Million users, making it one of New York's largest real estate portals, and has cultivated relationships at the majority of large and small brokerages in NYC, due in large part to its emphasis on design, data integrity and unique features. White simultaneously runs a software development and strategic consulting practice and is working with some large New York institutions on the development of additional undisclosed ventures. White attended the Richard Ivey School of Business in Canada before dropping out to grow a venture he launched at the time.
TED conferences bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives. TED is all about ideas worth spreading - in turn, TED.com offers the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free.
With over 1500 TED Talks and more added each week, scaling TED.com has come with some interesting challenges and innovations. Will True helps lead mobile product development at TED.com and will speak to these challenges and the future of mobile at TED.
The Startup Jackpot is a grassroots competition, organized by AND judged by startup entrepreneurs. All competitors will tell their startup story, sharing how they got started, the problem/solution their product provides, what challenges they have faced, and what they would do with the prize money. The winner will be determined through crowd-sourced voting. One lucky entrepreneur will be walking home with up to $10,000 in cold hard cash.
For more on the prizes and judging, read our FAQ.
The Jackpot is raised from all of the ticket sales and sponsorship dollars for the event. For NYC one startup will skip away with: