Hey, awesome. We made Hacker News.
I'm involved in organizing this. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know and I'll respond and if necessary add them to the FAQ: http://minnestar.org/minnespark/faq/
I'm involved in organizing this. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know and I'll respond and if necessary add them to the FAQ: http://minnestar.org/minnespark/faq/
Obviously $1K is not a lot of money to build a company, but the goal is to get people over the mental hurdles that are stopping them and hopefully get them to a place where they're making money online.
I'm a YC alumni so I'm influenced by that, but the idea is lifted from Scale Well in Chicago: http://scalewell.com/
The winner of the first Scale Well grant used it to refine his synthesizer, and he now sells Beep It on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=25223176
So $1000 is not a lot, but in certain situations it is enough to propel an existing project toward revenue generation.
And in fact, we're already getting some press about the event...it was written up next to the $130,000 Minnesota Cup in one of the business papers here.
Scale Well was itself inspired by The Awesome Foundation (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1040599) which has grown from our original Boston chapter to include Providence, NYC, and SF. Two more cities are ramping up: Ottawa and Philly.