Student Partner Provides Waffles & Whiteboarding Session for Startups
With such a pioneering and progressive innovation ecosystem as Tech Square, it’s no wonder that Georgia Tech’s student group, Startup Exchange, hosted an afternoon of networking with none other than Contrary, one of Atlanta’s leading venture firms, at The Clubhouse.
Organized by three focus areas – venture capitalism, working/interning for a startup, or founding a startup) – participants were invited to engage in open conversation-style networking at the Waffles & Whiteboarding event. The purpose being to facilitate discussions between people who were looking for the same entry points into the startup world.
The event kicked off with a brief introduction from Nouf Al Soghyar, an intern for Contrary, followed by a deeper understanding into Startup Exchange's membership program, delivered by their Director of Membership, Varoon Kodithala.
After the initial announcements, attendees were let loose for an hour of networking, complete with waffles catered from IHOP. The event was intentionally designed with limited structure to encourage a more conversational approach and less presentation-style. And those in attendance were beyond excited for the opportunity to converse with other like-minded individuals. In fact, several people shared ideas with others regarding a variety of different topics.
For instance, one person brought their Oculus to gauge feedback on their virtual reality (VR) startup, another talked to guests about his paper-trading platform that tracks non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency, and yet another attendee stayed at The Clubhouse long after the event concluded to talk about the supervised machine learning (ML) platform that he was creating. In general, lots of conversations were had, lots of contacts were exchanged, and lots of new connections were formed.
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