Two big announcements came yesterday out of Startup Weekend:
- Andrew Hyde (founder) has announced that Startup Weekend is hiring a CEO. This is the first organization based around creating products in a short span of time (54 hours for SW attendees) to hire a CEO.
- Startup Weekend 2.0 begins this weekend in Boulder for their second SW. Big changes include the following:
- Multiple Projects
- As a group we are no longer working on just one company. If a group of seven, one or 45 for that matter wants to tackle a project or start a company, fantastic. The community will take charge here, but nothing will be decided until Friday night. All equity decisions will be made at the event.
- Build on a Project
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A few weeks ago Startup Weekend hosted their 15th weekend (yes, 15th) in Bloomington Feb 8 – 10. I held off on posting about the weekend in hopes of sharing a website with everyone, but nothing is posted on the weekend’s project: Eventherder.
The site had the goal of being an aggregator for events, similar to how Fandango is for movies. The weekend left with much to be done (a demo was presented in house for the attendees), but as we’ve noticed with any weekend application development event, the hard part is keeping things going post-weekend.
We’ll see how if anything happens with Eventherder. I’m hoping they come out with a beta in the least…but it was a mighty task to undertake in less …
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Many new weekends have been announced in SW land over the past week. Here’s an update on where the planning stands:
Things will be interesting in March as Boulder (the founding city) hosts their second weekend. With about 15 weekends having occurred since the first innaugural Startup Weekend, it’ll be interesting to see what lessons that have learned are applied and how all of those lessons will turn into the potential launch of a second Boulder product.
Boulder’s first launch, Vosnap, was an online voting system that integrated SMS as an option for voting and receiving results. Things have been quiet since late September on …
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Blitzweekend has just announced they’ll be having their first weekend code fest in Montreal. Blitzweekend is following in the lines of what Startup Weekend has been doing with hosting a ~48 hour coding marathon with the hopes of creating a product from conception to launch. What’s the difference in the Blitzweekend approach? Simple, instead of 45+ people working on one project (SW style), BW will have sub-groups of people working on many projects (teams of about 8).
This may solve one of the major criticisms that SW has with participants and nah-sayers that there are too many people working on a project to have it be successful. While this is still debated till this day, we’ve seen successful projects come out of SW.
According to …
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Seattle Startup Weekend is underway at the Adobe offices in the great state of Washington. Skillbit is designed to be a social network for your office place, aimed at building community through the sharing of skills.
Seattle has been bringing the classic SW challenges:
- People don’t like the idea, so they leave and don’t return
- Rogue groups form
- Challenging task placed on either a huge group of people or a very small group
- etc.
The group is working on launching by 9pm tonight (a lofty goal in any startups view after only hours of working on a project). We’ll see how the first SW of the 2008 year turns out.
For those tracking Startup Land, here are some future weekends that have been planned:
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I’ve worked with several teams and committees across the country and one lesson I’ve learned that can’t be echoed enough is that “Talking doesn’t get a project launched — doing does.” Sure, common sense we know, but ask yourself how many meetings you’ve been in where all you do is talk about things rather than actually work towards accomplishing the goal?
I have seen the exception to this plague in our society, the work group. It’s not a committee. A committee sits in a circle and gives reports, occasionally but rarely doing actual tasks. The work group is a group that’s been created to perform a task. While a work group maintains elements of a committee (a leader, occasional talking without productivity, etc.) it differs …
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Tenth Weekend: Atlanta, GA
Dates: 11.9.2007 – 11.11.2007
Product: Skribit
Attendance: ??
Status: private-beta
Description: “Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion widget for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.”
Good luck to SF this weekend!…
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Ninth Weekend: Chapel Hill, NC
Dates: 11.2.2007 – 11.4.2007
Product: Work Perch
Attendance: 25
Status: alpha
Description: Find a place to rent a furnished office for a few hours or days based on where you’re at.…
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Eighth Weekend: Washington, DC
Dates: 10.26.2007 – 10.28.2007
Product: HolaNeighbor
Attendance: 74
Status: Third weekend to go live; alpha/beta
Description: You define your own community and HolaNeighbor will set up the online community. Find and meet those that live around you.…
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The more of I think of it, the more I’d be freaked out if I was a business owner of was thinking of starting a business. And here’s why business people need to start that freak out process, asap!
Short story
In less than 72 hours, a group of the brightest minds in the area got together and took an abstract non-existent concept into a full functioning business complete with site, business and marketing plans, and extended branding plans.
Long story
About 2 weeks ago SW weekend DC had 43 ideas being pitched, by Friday night we had 3 ideas left to consider. In a matter of about 90 minutes we finalized an idea of a business to build. Now, earlier in the week another …
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