IdeaDay at AZ Techweek 2026

Idealab was created by Bill Gross over 30 years ago as a parallel venture.

His idea was simple but profound, “what if instead of starting one venture and running it serially, what if I could make a startup that made startups in parallel?”

Today there are any number of accelerators, startup studios, and initiatives in universities and in regions to both concentrate and connect ideas and do some form of venture building. But Bill’s was the first in the world to do this and now 30 years later Idealab has launched over 175 ventures with over 50+ IPOs and acquisitions.

Bill has developed a playbook to find hard problems that haven’t been solved, develop a solution, and build a team and venture to solve and scale the solution. One of the innovations was Ideaday.

Here is how it works.

1. Doors open and students, startup founders, startup-curious folks, university researchers that wish they could see their work have a bigger impact, participants who want to join a startup team, and expert advisors come in and grab a light breakfast.
2. Bill (and or a featured keynote speaker) gives a keynote sharing lessons learned, throws out a few ideas they’d like to see tackled and the games begin.
3. Founders pitch their own ideas in 1-minute elevator pitches and highlight the sorts of roles they need help on.
4. Speed dating begins as folks recruit participants to join their team.
5. Then we spend the building out the “Baker’s Dozen.” These are the 13 slides that every Idealab venture has to build and pitch to get investment.
6. It’s 3pm real investors come in and the founders give 7-minute lightning pitches.
7. The investors have $500 dollars in Monopoly money post-it notes (that represent balance of how they’d invest based on what they heard.
8. The investors do a gallery crawl and place their bets.
9. We end the day finding out why the investors placed bets on a given startup so the founders and teams learn how the investors think and can gain insights from other teams and approaches.
10. 20-30% of the startups get a term sheet and we’ve already seen unicorns come out of the IdeaDays sometimes within 2-3 years of when it all begin.

So…

Someday someone will solve clean energy. Someday someone will figure out a way to get the benefit of AI without the harm. What if today was that day and you were that someone?

Click here to go to Youtube to watch a short trailer from Ideaday.

And the template we use is part of a larger collection of structure collective facilitation methods evolved over decades.