This week I was lucky enough to head down to New York City to tap into their startup scene and attend New York Entrepreneur Week (NYEW). NYEW is a five day long series of events that brings together some of New York’s best and brightest entrepreneurs for a week long of panels, workshops, networking, and even a few stints at stand up comedy and rapping.

NYEW was founded in 2009 by Gary Whitehill with the goal of making connections across diverse industries, from young idea-stage innovators to hundred million dollar revenue generators, and join them together in a unifying movement that propels inspired business, facilitates lasting connections, and generates opportunities for more successful entrepreneurial ventures. Gary has also founded the Relentless Foundation, Whitehill International, and is the driving force behind New York City’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

NYEW is wrapping up today with a special keynote from Steve Blank, 8x Serial Entrepreneur, Educator, and Best-selling Author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. While NYEW is wrapping up, part of this afternoon will also focus on kicking off  Startup Weekend NYC. The entire list of panels and events can be found here.

Yesterday I was able to grab Whitehill for an interview in the Scholastic Auditorium’s green room. Gary had some wild stories to tell, from starting a candy company at the age of 12 to holding an entrepreneur week in Africa. Check out our conversation below:

BostInnovation: How did you know you had what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

Gary Whitehill: At the age of six I had known that football was the only way I was going to get a scholarship to get into college. Football for me was the outlet and mechanism that I was going to get the education that my parents never got. But at the age of 12 my parents didn’t have enough money to pay for my cleats or my membership to play football. So I sat back and thought about what I could do to make money [as a 12 year old] and it just popped into my head that day in and day out kids just want candy.

We started out re-selling and making our own candy to three regional schools. I had two buddies in the other schools and we ended up making $100 a week for about a year, and was able to buy those football cleats which ultimately led me to play Division 1 football, which was my dream. We did get into some trouble though for pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the box. The school tried to expel us and treated us like we were drug dealers. Instead of having a lemonade stand we started a small candy company.

BostInno: Why did you start NYEW?

Whitehill: New York is one of the great hubs of the world with the culture and the incredible amount of companies here but there is a lot of natural fragmentation that happens. We started NYEW to create a platform to promote entrepreneurship holistically, by bringing together and creating an overlapping umbrella for all of the stakeholders in the community, the nonprofits, the for profits, and the city and the state organizations.

The entrepreneur needed a brand where they could come for the best and most valuable information that was hyper-targeted to their challenges. They could come for funding and more importantly a place that they could trust.

BostInno: What is the New York startup scene like? And who are the players here that excite you the most?

Whitehill: Well I don’t want to point out any particular companies, because I don’t think that is fair. New York has come a very long way in the past year and a half, and it’s not just one company or one investor, everybody has started to invest in this ecosystem to try to recoup those 60,000 jobs that we lost on Wall Street.

It is real exciting to see programs like TechStars and StartUp Weekend come here, even YCombinator is poking around here. The ecosystem is really starting to mature here are more and more co-working spaces and incubators popping up here. There is a lot mroe deal flow here, but we do need to be careful that we don’t create a bubble, because there are a lot of people playing with a lot of money and everyone is hot right now.

BostInno: Are you doing any work with the student populations here?

Whitehill: We give free passes to all students for events. We partner with school entrepreneurial programs like the NYU and Columbia to try to engage as many students as possible. The biggest thing we do is open up our network to the students, there are some great student run programs here and we have provided them with introductions and panelist recommendations.

BostInno: What is the goal of The Relentless Foundation and NYEW?

Whitehill: My goal and what we are doing with the Relentless foundation is to get entrepreneurship taught and expose it to every K-12 grade by 2030. To give kids an opportunity, you can’t play a saxophone if you’ve never been exposed to a saxophone.

For me Entrepreneur Week is the way to build a platform that helps to solidify ecosystems around the country and eventually around the world, to stand up together and promote entrepreneurship in a hyper targeted way. What that does as a by product is allow us the access to all of the organizations and stakeholders who would be interested in having entrepreneurship being exposed to kids in the long term.

BostInno: Any plans to expand to other cities?

Whitehill: Absolutely, next year we will be in four cities. And tentatively next September to hold Africa entrepreneur week in Cape Town South Africa, and be the first organization to stream it live to countries all over the world.

Have an experience from NYEW? Share it with us in the comments!