Vision: of the community, by the community, for the community
AustrianStartups is a neutral, independent and non-profit platform of, by, and for the Austrian startup community to increase its visibility, support existing initiatives, and strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It is an open place for all startups, stakeholders, and interested people, who are all encouraged to launch joint initiatives with us.
The importance of visibility
Some might argue that the startup scene in Austria isn’t that big. We are convinced, however, that it is rapidly growing and has a lot of great people who are pursuing great projects and initiatives for the community, as well as great startups in the community. This “community”, however, is difficult to grasp at times, for insiders and outsiders alike. The local Viennese startup scene does not really know what is happening in Tyrol, the different players in Styria might learn something from the experiences of the community in Upper Austria, and so on. Besides that, new entrepreneurs sometimes don’t know where investors or incubators are, investors sometimes don’t know about exiting startups and entrepreneurs sometimes don’t know about people who could act as a mentor to them. AustrianStartups wants to provide exactly this kind of visibility.
Bringing everyone on one table
There are shared interests but yet little coordination within “the community”… a shared initiative seems to be missing, that could leverage synergies. AustrianStartups is trying to fill this gap and connect the dots… not as a substitute to existing initiatives, projects, events, and organizations but as a shared layer for all of them. A neutral initiative and brand that brings the different stakeholders together and also aims to leverage and support existing initiatives that want to foster the startup ecosystem in Austria.
A little bit of organization neededWe are so good together
The neutral platform AustrianStartups acts as an aggregator and multiplicator for information, activities, and initiatives that are relevant to the startup community. Naturally, a form of organization is needed to funnel operations and ensure a structure that is bringing things forward. To ensure the most important part of it, the neutrality, we decided to create a non-profit organization (“Verein”), where any interested person can become a member.
National Community, Aggregated Ressources & Common Voice
To summarize, AustrianStartups intends to establish 3 pillars on which we hope the Austrian startup community can even grow bigger and get better connected:
First, creating a more connected national community for startups in Austria, and bringing all entrepreneurs together through initiatives like local meetups, an online forum, aggregated content on our Facebook page, and regional representatives.
Second, offering an in-depth and growing overview of the ecosystem itself, essential entrepreneurial tools, information, and events.
Third, by bringing relevant stakeholders together with startups, we want to formulate up-to-date needs and demands, and face them together with the community… a common voice to the public, so to speak.
Read the second Part of “What is AustrianStartups”
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