By Galen Moore
As many as 400 tech-minded students, bankers, lawyers, investors and entrepreneurs took to Boston’s streets in the drizzle last Friday afternoon in the Quest for Innovation.
The fundraiser and community-building exercise sent just over 100 teams scrambling through the city on a technology-themed scavenger hunt powered by Boston-based Scvngr Inc.
The event’s beneficiaries include four youth-focused entrepreneurial non-profits: NECINA Youth Entrepreneurship Service, TiE Young Entrepreneurs, the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s New England chapter, and Youth CITIES. A fifth beneficiary will be chosen by the winning team, which hailed from the DartBoston young entrepreneurs’ group.
“You had entrepreneurs, VCs and lawyers competing against each other — and then you had entrepreneurs, VCs and lawyers on the same team,” said Seth Priebatsch, the founder and CEO of Scvngr. “On a rainy afternoon, you might have expected a low turnout from a different group.”
Angel investor and Avid Technology founder Bill Warner shot a video of the event, and several participants posted photos to the photo-sharing service Flickr, which someone turned into a music video using the photo compiling service Animoto.
Priebatsch said Scvngr’s metrics showed an unusually high rate of participation in the activity. The company develops mobile-phone-powered scavenger hunts for events. All the teams did well on the questions, and the top 10 were all within 10 points of one another — a metric that shows all the teams got involved, he said. “Numerically speaking, everyone had a great time.”
Highland Capital Partners’ Michael Gaiss initiated the planning for the sold-out event. Sponsors included Deloitte, Foley Hoag LLP, Mass High Tech, Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center, the Museum of Science, Polachi Access Executive Search, Silicon Valley Bank, the UMass Venture Development Center, Wilmer Hale and Xconomy.
Posted by Brendan Lynch
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