Startup weekends are being planned for Sydney and Charlottetown in the coming month, giving aspiring entrepreneurs a chance to learn how to develop a business idea in a single weekend.

Techstars Startup Weekend, the international organization that oversees the 54-hour events around the world, said there are six events slated for Canada in the coming weeks, including the ones in the Maritimes.

The Charlottetown event will be held Nov. 1 to 3 at Startup Zone, and you can find tickets for it here. The Sydney Startup Weekend will be held Nov. 15 to 17 at Cape Breton University. You can register for the Cape Breton event here.

Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event starting on a Friday evening with any of the participants pitching startup ideas. The crowd of 50 or more attendees then vote on the best ideas to work on. The crowd breaks into several groups formed around the best ideas, and these teams work on their ideas for two days. The event is open to anyone interested in the local entrepreneurial community and it puts them in a setting where anything is possible.

“Perhaps we’ll see the start of the next Marcato Digital,” said Darren MacDonald, Director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurial Centre at Cape Breton University. “That company started through the development of software specifically for the Celtic Colours International Festival and now they have some of the largest festivals in the world, like Coachella, as their clients.” 

The Startup Weekend in Sydney is tourism themed, an industry that is ripe for disruption. “We have an established and growing tourism industry in Cape Breton, which creates opportunities for new startups, both within the industry or to service the industry,” said Terry Smith, CEO of Destination Cape Breton, a partner in Startup Weekend Sydney.

The Startup Weekend facilitator in Sydney will be Sally Ng, a familiar face to the East Coast startup community. A long-time businesswoman in Fredericton, Ng this summer joined Toronto-based Highline Beta as a New Ventures Manager, yet she still finds time to facilitate Startup Weekends.

The theme for the Charlottetown event is sustainability, and the Startup Zone team is hoping for a large crowd

“It's one of our bigger events of the year,” said CEO Patrick Farrar in an email. “I believe we had around 40 people last year and can expect the same this year.”