Anthony Broad-Crawford

For those following from afar I wanted to give you some insight into the schedule we are keeping on the bus.  It's jam packed of awesome.

• A pre-launch party on the night of the 8th will occur. Currently it's looking like at Atlassian's spacey SF offices.
• The bus will leave early morning the 9th. It will drive to Cupertino to get a personal coaching session with the CTO of Hewlett Packard, who is famous for his innovation training
• The bus will drive to LA (MySpace offices) to a party where you will be forced to pitch your startups for the first time. That means the drive to LA will focus on getting into teams and shortisting your ideas
• The bus going to arrive at Phoenix and have lunch at a local entrepreneurs meetup the next day
• A journalist will join us at this part of the trip to document what we are doing
• We will arrive in Austin around the late afternoon of the 11th, where you will get free massages at AustinDEEP and in another room get personal coaching from someone with a strong commercial background. You will then later that night at a cocktail party pitch your ideas to local Austin entrepreneurs and investors, which will give you practice for your first launch to the world about what you are doing.
• Bluebite will sponsor a campaign on the 12th and we are going to be strategic where we place it. Currently, I am thinking of placing it at the registration booths - meaning potentially all 10,000 people that attend SxSWi will get content we push on their mobile phones, which includes promotional videos from all your start-ups (one of the activities for the BD members of a team) as well as generate awareness about the SxSW party we're hosting.
• A party hosted by Venturehacks.com - the entrepreneur's bible - will occur either at a top floor condo next to the conference on the 12th or 13th; or potentially a 450 person venue as a classy bar on the 14th which will have a $4,000 bar tab. At this party, you will need to pitch your startups to a group of people. I can't promise who will attend but people I aim to get are: the Twitter co-founders (who Naval Ravikant knows personally), the people behind Techmeme (Gabe Rivera and Megan McCarthy who has said she wants to help out), and some tier1 blogs. I can't force people to attend, but it gives you an idea of the crowd I am trying to muster.
• The startup with the winning idea, will get personal coaching from Naval Ravikant  and Nivi of venturehacks, to help your idea become "investment grade" - meaning, you will then get introduced to 75 of Silicon Valley's super angels as part of their startuplist initiative:http://venturehacks.com/startuplist. You will also have the option to take investment from one of the sponsors.

This has been an amazing trip thus far and we are only on day two.  Don't forget you can follow the bus here.

I am really excited to say I got one of the twelve golden tickets to travel on The Startup Bus March 9th - 12th heading to SXSWi (South by Southwest interactive).  Having organized a similar event with Startup Weekend I know how exciting these events are.  Additionally, given the talented people who are participating I'm excited to get this opportunity.  

Although similar to other Startup weekend events founder Elias Bizannes has really kicked it up a notch in several different areas.  This includes but is not limited to ...

1. You request to participate rather then purchase a ticket
2. It's mobile as we are traveling from San Francisco to SXSWi in Austin
3. You have to raise money to get on the bus even after you get picked
4. You have to promote, represent, and create buzz for your company up to and at the event. 
5. You have to sell your company at the end of SXSWi

So, it's exciting that I have an opportunity to participate however, I am going to need your help in two different areas to help make this event and our regional representation a success.

In order to gain the most face time with the VC's, VIP conference parties, press access, etc I need to raise a lot of money and a lot of awareness (in the form of website traffic). Additionally, me doing so also gives me the opportunity to be a spokes person for my team.  My goal is to raise the most money and web traffic tapping into the passionate entrepreneurial community here in Cleveland so we have a Cleveland native taking the podium in front of the entire tech universe.  

For capital, I want to use $250 dollars as the investment amount and tap into every startup here in town.  I know you can afford to chip in and help increase our regional representation at the conference.  If we all do this Cleveland will get the face time and recognition it deserves.

Additionally we are going to produce more traffic to the Startup Bus website as we travel and attend the conference that the servers crash. Considering the biggest VC's, press, and companies from San Francisco, Austin, Boston, and New York will be there I want them to feel what' brewing in Cleveland.

To make this a community affair I am going to be heavily documenting my experience, travels, and adventures along the way.  So watch for blog posts, tweets, podcasts, pictures, and video.  Viewing, commenting, and participating will help me make Cleveland's presence felt by everyone on the bus and at the conference.

Update on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 10:56AM by Anthony Broad-Crawford

So I totally forgot on where to the money should go.  Because The Startup Bus hasn't become a business entity yet all sponsorships will go directly to me.  If you are interested in sponsoring please contact me directly and we will coordinate the exchange.  Again, thank you so much for all the responses I have received thus far.