WPI Journal - The Magazine for WPI Alumni

WIN 2013

The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)

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e StartupBus rolls new ideas along the information highway By David Enders ven in the gray chill of a long New York City winter, new ideas are germinating and Mike Caprio '99 is thinking ahead to spring. Time to take those ideas and start them up. ¶ The selfstyled Bon Vivant of Brooklyn knows and loves the Big Apple. He has a steady job as a software engineer with InterActiveCorp's About.com division working on cutting-edge technology in the ultra-cool Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. So when spring approaches, what would make him pack light, pile onto a bus with 20 or so virtual, albeit likeminded, strangers, and head to Austin, Texas? ¶ Caprio knows ideas alone aren't enough. They have to be ignited and set into motion. "Nothing happens until something moves," Albert Einstein postulated. And that's when the StartupBus rolls up. Caprio first learned about StartupBus in 2011 from an old hackathon friend on Twitter. The unlikely premise sounded sketchy—as if it were some kind of drunken bar bet— which it was. What if you put a bunch of IT entrepreneurs (aka hackers) on a bus outfitted with wifi and traveled from San Francisco to Austin and the South by Southwest Interactive Festival and ask them to create start-up companies while rolling away the miles for 72 hours? ¶ The experiment began in 2010 when StartupBus founder Elias Bizannes made good on his bar boast and set his crazy idea into motion. The surprising result was that a bus full of creativity fueled by Slim Jims, Cheetos, and RedBull (the hackers, that is, not the bus) can indeed get things started. It's a friendly competition, yes, but the payoff is that the hacker teams actually get to pitch their new start-ups to high-tech moguls and venture capitalists assembling at the tech-geek mecca and fast-growing SXSW conference. ingenuıty PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATT FURMAN Winter 2013 45

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