START Summit 2016 – Be Where Innovation Happens
The START Summit is Europe’s biggest student-led conference for entrepreneurship and technology, happening on March 18th and 19th at the University of St. Gallen (HSG). Welcoming 1,500 participants, the Summit will fortify its leading position as intercultural platform for startups, students and investors.
In 2016, the START Summit sets three focus topics: FinTech, Internet of Things and Future Mobility. Tom Mueller, CTO Propulsion at SpaceX, will talk about his career from an amateur-rocket engineer to Elon Musk´s second hand at SpaceX and also about the ambitions of the privately-held space company. With the Hyperloop, a further vision from the American star-entrepreneur Elon Musk will by represented by Bibop Gresta, the COO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.
In the field of FinTech, the promising blockchain-technology will be ubiquitous. One of the first Bitcoin programmers, Mike Hearn from the US, will talk about this much debated technology along with “The Guru of Bitcoin”, Andreas Antonopoulos. The subsequent issue of data security will then be discussed by the Israeli data security-specialist Shira Kaplan, who once served for the elite-technology-unit of the Israeli army and now brings her knowledge to Europe with her startup Cyverse. She will also be one representative of this year’s regional focus of the START Summit: Israel, known as the Silicon Valley´s competitor as important and fast growing Startup-Hub.
A conference is only as good as its participants. At the Summit, Startups will be omnipresent, looking for future employees as well as networking with investors. Some will even get the chance to present themselves on top of the main stage as part of the START Summiteer contest. Preliminary to the Summit, 40 Startups have been selected throughout pitching-contest in Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen, leaving for a final number of 16 who will compete for the CHF 10,000 trophy money.
One last highlight constitutes the START Hack, happening for the first time in St. Gallen. It is a 40-hour coding challenge designed by corporations, taking place one week in advance to the Summit itself and welcomes students from all over the world, for instance from the MIT, the Technion Institute of Technology and from Stanford. The coders will then be given the chance to present their prototypes in a managerial context; some of them will also get the chance to be present at the START Summit.
Students, businessmen, investors as well as representatives of the private sector who want to profit from this interdisciplinary platform are warmly welcomed to attend the START Summit 2016 in St. Gallen and can apply online on www.startsummit.ch.
