Boulder Startup Week is taking place virtually for the second year in a row. The 12th annual event kicked off Monday and will run online through Friday.
The free conference-style event brings together thousands of entrepreneurs, investors and other people interested in the startup scene. This year, however, guests will be brought together via a new event platform called revnt.
Imagine a Zoom meeting where you can take notes alongside the presenter’s screen and access those notes and a recording of the event at any time, even if you can’t make the live meeting. That’s what Boulder-based startup revnt offers.
Revnt is the first continuous events platform, according to company CEO and co-founder Chris Deardorff. Although Boulder Startup Week only runs for five days, registered attendees will be able to access past recordings and any notes taken on revnt’s platform until mid-June.
“It allows people to experience the event however they choose,” Deardorff told Built In. “We totally get the Zoom fatigue. If people don’t want to sit through an entire eight-hour event, they [can] watch a few sessions each day, and then for the next month, they can go back and experience everything else. We have over 50 sessions for people to check out and there’s no way anyone can experience all those sessions in a week alone. We’re really opening the doors for so much more engagement and better experiences with the overall week.”
In addition to the features for attendees, revnt also benefits event hosts. The platform tracks engagement levels and other data. Since attendees have access to the event for days, weeks or months after the event ends, engagement levels and viewership tend to be higher.
“For the first time, event host can know more than just, ‘Okay, I know how long people were in my event,’ but [now] we can actually tell them how active and how truly engaged people were during their event,” Deardorff said.
Deardorff, 37, has been involved in the event space for the last 15 years. As someone who put on events, he often found himself wondering why he put so much time, energy and money into events that only last for a short period of time and then vanish into thin air. As an event attendee, Deardoff, like many of us, would come home with hard-to-read notes, random business cards, and no access to conference presentations.
Deardorff said he has been working on revnt since last July. Deardorff and Alex Vanston, who now serves as the company’s CTO, launched the platform in December. Boulder Startup Week is revnt’s fourth event since launching.
More information about Boulder Startup Week, including a complete list of sessions, can be found here. Speakers in this year’s event include a range of tech professionals and executives from companies including Google, Twitter, SteadyMD, JumpCloud and UiPath.
