Maybe you have an idea for a business but don’t know where to start. Or you’ve already started one and are looking for funding, a mentor, or someone who can help you figure out what comes next.
Those are the kinds of questions the 14th annual San Diego Startup Week hopes to answer November 2–6. Organizers expect more than 5,000 founders, investors, students, and San Diegans interested in entrepreneurship to take part in five days of keynote talks, pitch competitions, networking, workshops, panel discussions, and one-on-one mentoring.
“Our mission is to make entrepreneurship accessible to anyone,” said Lisa Barnhouse, executive director of San Diego Startup, the nonprofit behind the event. “Not everyone knows someone [who can help get them started]. Sometimes people will say, ‘Oh, I’ve heard that you’ve got to lean on your network, but I don’t have a network.’ So what we’re trying to do is make it accessible by answering their questions, letting people hear the stories, hooking them up with mentors, and introducing them to services they might not have known were available to them.”
San Diego Startup Week includes more than 60 events with over 100 speakers across its main conference and associated community events. Community organizers can also submit startup-related events for consideration on the week’s calendar. The main conference venue changes each day with locations ranging from Carlsbad Village and the College Area to Torrey Pines and La Jolla.
“We have people who are curious—maybe they have regular full-time jobs and they want to break out and become an entrepreneur,” Barnhouse said. “Maybe they have an idea and they want to know what it takes. Not everyone can go through an entrepreneurial program in university. So they learn about everything that week with curated programming for entrepreneurs.”
Courtesy of San Diego Startup
A volunteer board of directors that includes educators, economic development representatives, and members of the private sector organizes the programming.
“When people register to come to one of our events, we always ask what their biggest pain point is as a founder, and most often they will say it’s access to capital and finding mentorship. And we have a lot of resources for that,” Barnhouse said.
The event brings together people from a range of industries, from consumer packaged goods and customer service tech, to life sciences, medical tech, cybersecurity, and defense. This year’s theme is “Where Startups Take Off.”
“There’s San Francisco Tech Week and LA Tech Week where it’s hundreds of events that are mostly tech-focused and people are coming in from all over to attend the conferences,” Barnhouse said. “Well, San Diego is different. We’re supporting San Diego and the people who are already here building—and need to meet each other, learn more about starting something, or prepare to be investment-ready.”
Keynote speakers include Daniel Marashlian, co-Founder and chief technology officer of Drata, a cybersecurity company valued at more than $1 billion; and John Resnick, co-Founder and CEO of Worthwhile Hospitality, the restaurant group behind Campfire, Wildland, and Michelin-starred Jeune et Jolie and Lilo in Carlsbad.
The San Diego Founders Showcase will bring together 30 early-stage startups with a mix of investors ranging from early-stage angel investors to venture capitalists. At the Women’s Venture Summit crossover event called The Opportunity Exchange, founders will have a chance to connect with investors, advisors, and other leaders. Throughout the week, attendees can also explore exhibitor booths and join networking mixers.
The event culminates in two pitch competitions, a lightweight intercollegiate competition and a heavyweight Founders Fight Club, where participants will pitch their business ideas. Eight finalists will compete in each category, with judges including Dane Chapin, Founder, CEO and founder of USAopoly (The Op), and Andy Ballester, co-Founder & chief product officer of EyePop.ai and co-founder of GoFundMe.
Courtesy of San Diego Startup
“What I look for in companies that I invest in or spend time mentoring is the team has to be right,” Ballester said. “With early teams, they may not have been operating long enough to have a lot of signal, so you want to make sure that the team is coachable and that they have some sort of unfair advantage.”
“Why them? They should answer that question really well—and it’s because they have lived experience in the problem or they’ve been doing this for the last 20 years,” he said. “I also look at the space. Is this a product that’s either immune to AI or benefits greatly from AI?”
For budding entrepreneurs in the early stages, Ballester’s advice is to get started right away and put their ideas into action. He says aspiring entrepreneurs can use agentic AI to get surprisingly far in creating a workable prototype—or at least something that describes their vision well—even without a technical background. The next step is to identify target customers and figure out how to cut through all the noise to reach them, he says.
San Diego Startup Week tickets are $99 for single-day admission or $229 for a weeklong pass. View the full schedule and purchase tickets at sandiegostartupweek.org.
Kai Oliver-Kurtin is a San Diego-based writer who covers travel, dining, events, and culture. Her writing has been published in USA Today, Condé Nast Traveler, Fodor's Travel, Marie Claire, and HuffPost, among others.
