The pirate spirit is catching on. With The European Pirate Summit only a few days away, we found another pack of Pirates going out to sea. The Startup Pirates have just organized their first event in Porto, last week. And that was only the beginning of what they, and we, hope will be a worldwide phenomenon.

The Startup Pirates is a movement that wants to create one-week Startup Schools around the world, bringing together the latest discoveries in the technology field with the experience and talent of successful entrepreneurs.

What does the Startup Pirates Movement bring new to the scene?

It all sounds really good to us, so we tried to get a bit more detail about what the Startup Pirates Movement is bringing new to the scene of startup support programs. Here’s what Joao Oliveira, one of the original Startup Pirates, told us: “We’ve clearly identified a lack of opportunities to get the knowledge and tools to create a startup in the current educational system and, based on our experience, we figured out that there a lot of great events but they just have one of two approaches: theoretical and practical. In the Startup Pirates program we combine both with the experience and insights from talented and successful entrepreneurs with a more hands-on approach. This way we believe that we’re going to empower people to become more disruptive, creative and entrepreneurial bringing more ideas into real projects. We also support our teams after the event. We have a partnership with a crowdfunding platform, Dreamtby.me,  to which Startup Pirates teams have easy access.”

How about organizing your own Startup Pirates event?

As we mentioned earlier, the Startup Pirates Movement is supposed to catch on all around the world, through locally organized events. Does this ring a bell to any of you? Here’s what Joao had to say about this: “We’re looking for highly-motivated organizations/teams that want to boost an entrepreneurial mindset in their region. Our role is to help and support them with our knowledge and expertise to maximize the output of our program. We strongly believe Startup Pirates is a fantastic way to foster an entrepreneurial attitude in any community.” Oh, and here’s a nice presentation about the movement!

What happened in Porto?

Porto was the host of the first Pirate Startup event. Joao gave us a few insights about who attended and how it all went.

“Last week at Startup Pirates@Porto, our first event, we had an amazing group of Pirates. People from 5 different countries (Portugal, Argentina, South Africa, Germany and UK) with different backgrounds (eg: Pharmacy, Architecture, Psychology, History of Arts, Design, IT or Civil Engineering) between 17 and 41 years old. They did a wonderful job and the best three ideas were selected to be pre-incubated at UPTEC, our local incubator.

However, this program was clearly thought for engineering students or recent undergrads that want to launch their own projects right after college, but feel they need more knowledge in the business side of the company.

The Startup Pirates@Porto was an overwhelming experience for participants, entrepreneurs and organisers and we received amazing feedback from the investors who were in the Final Pitches session.  We had ideas from different fields, from sustainable construction to online games, but most of them were related with the web and the mobile area. Anyway the teams still have a lot of work to do but they’re on the right track after Startup Pirates.”