Startup Equinox hosts kickoff event Wednesday

On Wednesday, the student organization Startup Equinox will host the Startup Equinox Kickoff Event for all students interested in innovation.

Startup Equinox is tailored to meet the needs of students who are looking to pitch ideas and connect these ideas to fellow students, faculty and professionals who have successfully worked in entrepreneurial environments.

The event will have two parts. The first will start in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center Ballroom before attendees are to be transported to the Viterbi Hacker House located on Adams Boulevard. The event is set to begin at 6:30 p.m.

Spencer Price, a member of the organization, said he has been looking forward to the event for weeks.

“The event will be a forum-style gathering where we expect to see hundreds of prospective entrepreneurs come together to listen, learn and network with one another to start turning ideas into realities,” Price said in an email to the Daily Trojan.

The members of Startup Equinox have put together a group of speakers over the course of the event. Price said that the event will begin with a panel discussion featuring three speakers including Ron Miller, partner of StartEngine; James Bottom, project director of USC’s Blackstone LaunchPad; and Eytan Elbaz, co-founder of Scopely and head of domain channel at Google.

The president of Startup Equinox, Asher Genoot, said the speakers would discuss their experiences starting out in the tech industry.

“They will be focusing on one specific thing that they wish they would have known before starting out,” Genoot said.

The next part of the event will include five companies pitching ideas: three that are USC start-ups; one from Mike Jones, former CEO of Myspace; and the last from Elbaz.

Genoot said the main section of the event will take place after the five pitches.

“The primary purpose is to unite students together,” he said. “We want to pull back on great guest speakers and pull forward on having more students featured.”

Students will have the opportunity to present their pitches to the hundreds of attendees in the Campus Center Ballroom.

“The event’s main purpose — getting students involved and eager to collaborate — revolves around the 40 student fast-pitches which will be one minute each,” Price said in an email to the Daily Trojan.

During the event, student band The Neighbors will be performing and food will be served.

Once the event has concluded in the Campus Center, all attendees with an RSVP can take a chartered bus to the Viterbi Hacker House for refreshments with other students and networking with the speakers.

“We are really pushing our effort to work with other institutes on campus like the Hacker House and to create a friendly environment,” Genoot said.

Genoot said the goal of Startup Equinox is to bring students together to create a community geared toward creating new ideas.

“The community here is very fragmented. You have Marshall stuck within Marshall, Viterbi stuck within Viterbi, Annenberg with Annenberg,” Genoot said. “In order to create a successful project or company, you have to have students that are from different backgrounds. We want to bring students together based on passions rather than background.”