I am part of the core team who organised the StartupWeekend in Paris. In all honesty, I was unsure how the event was going to turn out and, having been there since Saturday, I have to say: it’s amazing!

The teams that formed around ideas/problems/needs are just amazing!! They didn’t know each other on Friday evening when they arrived and they are now working together till 5am, having breakfast, debating on business plans…

The only downside to the event has been the lack of sponsorship from lots of early stage Venture Capital firms. We have and thank Sun, Orange, Mappy, Orkos, Altaïde, Metaboli, Planet-Work and La Cantine but all the venture capital firms that we contacted were not interested. I am failing to understand why, since hunting for new businesses and investing in them is their job – if I am mistaken, please correct me.

I can only find two explanations for this phenomenon: either the guys working in these VC firms are not passionate about VC to spend the weekend with entrepreneurs, in which case perhaps you should give me your job; or, the firms don’t have any money to invest, which is a poor argument sincewe asked for €500 upwards AND a lot of our sponsors and members of the jury paid for the entry ticket themselves – so back to point 1.

Despite this lack of enthusiasm from the financial world, the companies and ideas generated there are amazing and I invite you all to check out the live company presentation feed on Sunday evening (I will post the URL here and on twitter/facebook).