Northern StartUp 2.0's mission is to help create an ecosystem in the North of England for digital startup community, which is made up of entrepreneurs, developers, investors, deal makers and service providers.

History

In 2004, soon after completion of his Executive MBA at Manchester Business School, Manoj Ranaweera, founder of Northern StartUp 2.0, decided to embark on his startup career by founding ebdex Ltd. During the first year, having come from a corporate background, Manoj realised that he has very little knowledge of the startup world. He lacked significant connectivity to the startup community. The only answer at the time was to attend events in London to learn from other entrepreneurs.

In 2006, Manoj enquired on TechCrunchUK whether anyone knows about similar events taking place in the North. The response was "NO". Sam Sethi, Editor of TechCrunchUK at the time suggested that Manoj start an event series in the North. At the same time, Ivan Pope, Founder of NetNames was also making enquiries about events in Brighton. Ivan, Sam and Manoj reached a decision to launch a series of events in the North and South. Manoj would manage North whilst Ivan would manage South. Sam would provide the publicity through TechCrunchUK.

So, here is the coverage of our very first event in Manchester. At earlier on, I managed to convince KPMG Manchester to come on board as a supporter of the events, at the time the event series branded as NW Start Up 2.0. We held the first event at IoD Manchester.

Since then Sun Microsystems and eOffice have joined as supporters of the initiative.