Award winning international content creators The Startup Van will collaborate with WeWork, the community company committed to helping people create their life’s work.
The deal will allow the entertainment company for entrepreneurs to build on the success of its daily Facebook Live breakfast show ‘The Roundup’, to launch an evening chat show called ‘Behind The Curtain’. The first episode will air in March.
The Startup Van was founded by Graham Hussey and Mark McDonagh in Dublin in 2015. The Startup Van travelled the world in a vintage VW van fitted with a film studio interviewing startups and incredible entrepreneurs, with a mission to inspire and educate other founders and the wider business community.
The Startup Van has interviewed influential people, from YouTube sensation Jamal Edwards OBE to serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and worked with some leading names such as Stephen Kelly from Sage and Ann Boden from Starling Bank.
The new show ‘Behind The Curtain’ is a ‘secret’ live chat show where the identity of the guest entrepreneur is hidden from the audience in the lead up to the Curtain drop.
The audience will be a curated list of entrepreneurs, giving them exclusive admittance to the eventful night with live entertainment, food and beverages. The unscripted interview will also be broadcasted via Facebook Live alongside distribution through YouTube and other social media outlets. Facebook Live viewership over the year is expected to exceed 1.2 million entrepreneurs across the UK and Ireland.
Graham Hussey, Co-Founder of The Startup Van, said “We’ve always believed that there’s nothing more exciting than the spirit of entrepreneurship, but events and especially video content rarely reflect this. We want to create a really special, intimate experience for people in the live studio audience and share this experience with viewers online. We’re betting big on Facebook Live this year, done right it’s an incredible platform. The fact that over a million entrepreneurs will watch ‘Behind The Curtain’ this year is very cool.”
WeWork will collaborate with The Startup Van to bring the show to entrepreneurs across the UK and Ireland. The show will be filmed in different WeWork event spaces around London, Manchester and The Startup Van’s hometown of Dublin where the audience will be a mix of WeWork members and a curated list of entrepreneurs. WeWork and The Startup Van will distribute the show to their networks and Startup Van will be documenting their time as WeWork ambassadors to their followers.
Mark Goldfinger, Director of Expansion for Europe, Israel & Australia said “WeWork is a global network of workspaces. We transform buildings into dynamic communities where companies and people can grow together. We’re looking forward to hosting The Startup Van in our locations around the UK and Ireland and bringing Behind the Curtain to our community in real life and online”.
In April 2017, The Startup Van parked up in London and opened a dedicated film studio in Shoreditch to launch the hit breakfast show ‘The Roundup’ on Facebook Live. Streaming every morning at 8:30am to their loyal followers, ‘The Roundup’ features the UK’s most up and coming entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technology reviews.
The Startup Van has also travelled around the world to destinations including Hong Kong, Australia and a number of major cities in America interviewing startups and enabling them to reach an increasingly international audience.
Mark McDonagh, Co-Founder of The Startup Van, commented “On top of our partnership with WeWork we are in the middle of agreeing another partnership with one of the worlds biggest accelerators to create a six part documentary series which is shaping up to be very exciting, and in the third quarter we are set to raise our first round of funding to grow the team and expand The Startup Van brand to America”
