Venture Café
Open-knowledge reference entry
Venture Café is a nonprofit organization that hosts community events and programs that support early-stage entrepreneurs.
As of May 2020, there are 11 independently managed Venture Cafés, located in Boston, St. Louis, Missouri; Miami; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Providence, Rhode Island; Tokyo, Japan; Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Warsaw, Poland; Bilbao, Spain; and Sydney, Australia. As of 2019, there were plans to open Venture Cafés in some 40 more cities.
The flagship event of Venture Café is the Thursday Gathering, a weekly meeting for new and experienced entrepreneurs to exchange ideas and support. The event usually includes several free educational sessions to teach entrepreneurs to how to start and run a business. Participants can also hold informal discussions of creative and speculative ideas and look for collaborators, co-founders, mentors, or investors.
History
The Venture Café was conceived as a restaurant in the Cambridge Innovation Center in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea failed to attract investment, so the founders changed it to a gathering space for the entrepreneurial community, based on the book Venture Café by Teresa Esser. Venture Café Kendall launched in 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Venture Café” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.