Today, we start Hypepotamus Week, a weeklong celebration and review of the first six months of impact Hypepotamus has made on the Atlanta tech startup community.
On January 31, 2013, Heath Hyneman, Kevin Wallace, and Ashish Mistry signed the papers officially creating Hypepotamus, Inc. as a Georgia nonprofit corporation. What started as a collaboration space in April 2012 grew into a groundswell of people committed to building the next great wave of companies and by the beginning of 2013 needed an organizational structure to help drive greater awareness, collaboration, and education. Thus, Hypepotamus, Inc. was born.
What is a Hypepotamus? 100% organic, grass-fed, free range Connected Awesomeness.
In just six months time with a bootstrap budget, Hypepotamus has already made a significant impact here in Atlanta. Thanks to a strong cadre of staff, interns, volunteers, and sponsors, Hypepotamus:
- organized Startup Rally, the largest gathering of startups in Georgia since 1895
- instigated the SXSW ATL Takeover 2013 and begun to organize SXSW ATL Takeover 2014
- hosted over 160 events welcoming almost 7,000 attendees
- helped the City of Atlanta and Invest Atlanta organize Govathon, the first city-wide hackathon
- assembled ATL Hoops Hack, the first ever hackathon benefitting the NCAA Men’s Final Four
- launched media operations on May 1 that has since published 168 articles, 2,122 tweets, 189 Facebook updates, 58 videos, 1 infomercial, 70 infographics, and profiled 53 people
- created a community-driven Summer Startup Academy with 60 students and over 50 startup leaders participating
- introduced the monthly Ecommerce School, Corporate Innovators Jam Session, and Better Atlanta Project
- coined the term “Connected Awesomeness” and created the vision for Southern Fried Supernova
- helped fuel the success of Big Data Week and National Day of Civic Hacking
- and threw a heckuva Startup Bonfire @ Start Camp
We look forward to sharing over the next five days a full accounting of what your support and encouragement has helped create through Hypepotamus. Keep tabs on the updates and stories we’ll be posting here by following us on Twitter and Facebook.
In case you wanted to peer into the synaptic structure of Hypepotamus, here you go: