Paul WetenhallSpeaking: Friday evening
Topic: Keys to Startup Success
Bio: Paul Wetenhall is president of the Ben Craig Center, a non-profit business incubator affiliated with UNC Charlotte that provides business guidance to innovation-based entrepreneurs.
At the Ben Craig Center and previously as president of High Tech Rochester Inc., Paul has assisted the business development of over 120 early-stage technology companies. He is currently a director of Odyssey Software Inc., a mobile and embedded device software developer. Earlier in his career, Paul founded QSoft Solutions Corp., a business process software business. He was the co-founder of Microlytics, a venture capital funded software firm that commercialized technology from Xerox' Palo Alto Research Center. Previously, he served in marketing, pricing, and product management roles for Xerox Corporation. Paul is an engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and he earned an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill.
Travis ParsonsSpeaking: Friday morning
Topic: Travis will be Mentoring Attendees
Bio: Travis Parsons runs Cloud Castle, a developer of mobile and web apps for startups, growth companies and its own portfolio. Previously Travis was Founder and CEO of Charlotte-based Elogex, a transportation management SaaS company, and EVP of Dallas-based One Network Enterprises following the acquisition of Elogex by investment group Transcend Partners.
Prior to founding Elogex, Travis was a private equity investment professional with Bank of America Capital Investors and BluePoint Capital Partners. Travis graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina in 1994. Twitter | LinkedIn
Tyler WilliamsBio: Highly effective and motivated IT professional with over 15 years of experience, including leadership roles in business process design and software implementation as well as hands-on experience designing system architecture and performing software development.
A dedicated, team focused, results-oriented individual with demonstrated technical and leadership skills.
David TurnerBio: Experienced software developer with over 6 years experience with emphasis on object-oriented design, UML, design patterns, refactoring, extreme programming, continuous integration, shell tools, and bug tracking systems.
Excellent multitasking and communication skills.
Brett BumeterBio: B
rett entered social media building on 18 years of experience in marketing, sales, intelligence, process management, finance, accounting & contracts. He left the high rise corporate world and a startup office with a view of a man made pond in Buckhead, for a Cove on Lake Wylie across from Charlotte, NC where a WiFi connection and an international airport keep him connected to the world. Today Brett works his business development voodoo by helping people adapt businesses to the web using WordPress as a Content Management System along with its bonanza of open source tools. Brett has a Bachelor’s of Science from Illinois State Universit, Double Major in Accounting and Finance, holds a Masters in Laws from St Thomas University School of Law in International Taxation, and has graduated from various military intelligence schools in signals intellegicence and electronic warfare. @brettbum | LinkedIn
Attendee TweetsPosted by Tyler Williams
Thanks to the 30 plus developers, designers, marketers, sponsors, mentors, speakers and all around talented participants who made the 1st Charlotte Startup Weekend a HUGE success!!!
Posted by Tyler Williams
LAST CHANCE DISCOUNT!!!
With the event kicking off later today, marketers, coders and especially designers are still needed to make this a success.
If you’ve been meaning to register, this is it! Use this last minute discount code icanhasdiscount to receive 25% off.
Posted by Brett Bumeter
Attendees are still signing up and registering, but here is the start of some of our great attendees coming to the first Charlotte Startup Weekend.
There are still spots available to sign up (see the Register Button) for this event this weekend.
If you’ve already signed up, take a minute to get to know your fellow attendees, if you are not listed here yet, please ping me follow me on twitter & ping me so I can DM my email address to you to gather up your bio summary and a headshot plus any links for sharing. 
Some of the people on the list have just signed up and we haven’t had a chance to reach out to them for some basic profile information yet.
Jim Van Fleet
Specialties: Software architecture, Ruby on Rails development, Sinatra, Cucumber, MySQL, git, MongoDB, chef, Solr, ActiveMQ, monit/bluepill. |
Darin Pope
Specialties: J2EE Architecture, development best practices; iPhone, Android and Blackberry development |
Chris Halligan
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Ryan Burkhart
Award-winning artist, graphic designer and art director with proven success in managing creative campaign development, developing impactful branding identity and producing effective creative collateral, advertising, social media, web and multimedia tools. |
Mark Squires
|
Sara Burkhart
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Summer Plum
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Ben Vandgrift
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Brian Blanton
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Daniel WilsonTwitter | LinkedIn |
Matthew LefevreTwitter | LinkedIn |
Quincy Acklen
Twitter | LinkedIn |
D.I. von Briesen
Twitter | LinkedIn |
David Turner
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Harish Yarlagadda
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Eli Doran
Specialties: Java (SE, EE), GWT, GAE, Tapestry, Unit testing with code coverage (JUnit, Cobertura), Ant/Maven, Eclipse, Subversion, Ajax, ORM, Dependency Injection. Twitter | LinkedIn |
Mike Autry
Bio: Financial Executive with CFO, Controller and senior level leadership training and experience at large domestic and international organizations, but who enjoys the challenge of entrepreneurial environments. Adept at developing and implementing policies and procedures. Familiar with reorganizing processes and departments. Innovative leader, skilled in project management and problem resolution. Excellent contract and vendor negotiating skills. Able to improve operations while decreasing cost. Outstanding communication and presentation skills. Specialties: • Strategic and Financial planning/Budgeting; |
Flaviu Simihaian
Bio: I graduated in 2008 with an Economics degree and a yen for IT, having done it on the side throughout my life (I taught high school level AP CS while in college). Since the economics field looked grim, I was lucky to find a great job in IT at UNC Charlotte, and for the 1.5 years since I’ve been learning all I could about the field, and completed my master in Software Design and Engineering this semester. My job is to administer a Java web application with an Oracle database as well as the technology for supporting Online Programs offered by the UNC Charlotte Continuing Education department. After getting certified in Java EE, I found Python/django to be a much lovelier alternative that I try to incorporate into my work as well as other web development side-projects. Basically, if I’m developing, I might as well make it as much fun as possible. So, I am looking to start a small business because I do not want to work corporate. Why? I like to be challenged and learn new things constantly, in a creative environment, and the corporate companies I’ve looked at do not lend themselves to that. I think the weekendstartup is a great event to meet some similar people and learn a lot from them. I can contribute system architecture skills, but also server-side development, as I am a jack of multiple trades, though graphic design takes me forever. As for hobbies, I played tennis in high school and college, and a little professionally, but quit and now I mostly golf away from the fairway. I also like reading (books and feeds) and grilling burgers. |
Rod Guzzo
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Marc Tiegel
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Eric Orozco
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Darryl Banks
Twitter | LinkedIn |
Posted by Startup Weekend Crew
With three days left until the event, things are shaping up well. We have attendees from most of the categories but are severely lacking people with UI Experience and Design skills. If you’re still on the fence, here’s the pitch…
All of these skills will be in high demand this weekend as teams work to successfully launch a startup in 54 hours. Come out to Enventys this weekend and join a team of programmers, marketers and startup enthusiasts who would really love to have your help building a company from the ground up!
Posted by Startup Weekend Crew
One of the best things about Startup Weekend events in addition to some great experience is the people. You are about to meet some smart, interesting, hard working people and you might just launch a company with them too!
To kick that off, we are sending out requests to everyone that has signed up already to consider sharing some information about themselves so that we can make some early online introductions.
You can already start following Charlotte Startup Weekenders on Twitter with one click.
We would like to facilitate some early introductions of Attendees to each other. To achieve this we would like to publish short bios of each attendee that opts in on our website here at http://charlotte.startupweekend.org/ .
If you have a short bio (a paragraph or two) handy that would be ideal. Similarly, if you have a summary on LinkedIn that you would like us to use that will work too. We want to make this as easy as possible for everyone. It shouldn’t feel like a job application, nor a resume, just something simple to help other understand what you can do. These bios will help all attendees start to get a better sense of the potential group members that they will meet and work with and maybe even launch a successful company this month!
We would like to include a quick picture or image with each of these summary biographies and some quick online contact information to help people do some preliminary networking. The better we get to know each other the faster we can dive in and get to the fun stuff once Startup weekend arrives.
Here are items that we would like to request:
Privacy Considerations – We will not share your phone number or email address online. The above information is not required, and you can provide as much or as little as you like.
How to Provide Your Profile Information
After registering, you should receive a separate email from one of us here helping to organize the event.
To provide your information, please simply reply to the email attaching or pasting in the information or picture.
Optionally Using Your LinkedIn Summary
If you would like us to use the image and summary on your LinkedIn profile, please let us know in your email. Consider that your LinkedIn Summary may be generic or possibly focuses on your past and not what you want to make your future into by starting a new company, so consider whether writing a new paragraph about yourself might help.
Finally, if you have any questions about the upcoming event, please feel free to leave a comment below. We’re working to build out the FAQ page on the site and would like to provide more information and answers to everyone, so any questions would definitely be appreciated.
Posted by Startup Weekend Crew
Wonder what Startup Weekend is? Check out the website and these photos from LASW.
Day One + Two: (just click through to download)
Day Three: (just click through to download)
Bio: An experienced software architect, and an expert Ruby on Rails developer, with an advanced understanding of the role of application development of any kind within its operational environment. I am committed to excellence in architecture and absolutely obsessed with preventing crucial system failures.
Bio: Darin founded PlanetPope, Inc. in late 2005 as a world-class organization to provide expert implementation of enterprise-ready open source software solutions . Throughout his professional career, Darin has focused on creating, marketing, selling and implementing service-based solutions – including both consulting and support services. His experience includes designing and implementing highly available and scalable web site solutions, from requirements gathering to implementing the ongoing maintenance and upkeep. In other words, he constructs the infrastructure that supports millions of visitors and tens of millions of unique page views each and every day. 
Bio: Chris Halligan is an experienced high tech executive with expertise in sales, marketing, planning and fund raising. He worked for Dell Computer Corporation from 1989 to 1999, ran North America for webMethods from 1999 to 2001, has co-founded several startups, including Mascot Books (
Bio: 
Bio: My name is Mark, I have been interested in technology since 8th grade when i was playing with DOS on little Pentium 166′s. Since then i have written software in a variety of languages, C++, JavaScript, Pascal, C#, visual basic, vbscript. I found an intern position at MassMutual Financial Group in Springfield, MA, where i learned a lot about how large businesses function. After a few years in a large company with that much politics i knew i had to trying out some other things. I’ve always been entrepreneurial so I’ve jumped around from job to job and always had little side projects going on. I love playing with new technologies and tools. Primarily i do a lot of web based development. I currently work at LendingTree.com where I am responsible for a number of tasks including architecture, development, analytics software, helping with server infrastructure on Amazon ec2(cloud computing). In my spare time I am playing around with a lot of ideas and technologies. I’m currently trying to test SEM marketing and possibly create some LEAD GEN tools to present at a LEADSCON conference. I like doing everything technical and i don’t mind getting involved in marketing or business management tasks, as I just like to feel like I’m adding value.
Specialties: Strategy development and execution, developing comprehensive media plans, creative advertising vehicles, negotiating advertising contracts, collateral development, budget development and administration.
Bio: Worked self-employed wearing many hats as well as a part of a large enterprise team. 
