MatthewVB

Two big announcements came yesterday out of Startup Weekend:

1. 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.
2. 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
  • An existing company can recruit a few some brilliant tech minds to spend two hours with working to make their project stronger.
• No Company Required
  • Every project will be different, but there will be no requirement to incorporate a company

The second point comes as a big move as this has been a hotly contended issue in SW past. Other weekends have already taken steps to decrease team size and put more power in the hands of the attendees as to “What happens Next?” Whether the weekend is a success or not, each product launched has the choice to do as they wish.

This is a shift in mentality from a group coming together around a common product and working as a team to being more of a code fest. People are now able to get together, put together what they want, and do with it what they want.

It’ll be interesting to see how shares are distributed and ownership happens with these changes. If one project doesn’t want to go to the group — how will it impact the ownership of that product? According to the site, power still resides with the group, but this weekend will prove whether that’s really the case or not.

Good luck to Boulder! Looking forward to seeing which app(s?) come out of the weekend.

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 than 72 hours.

Next Startup Weekend scheduled: Boulder II: March 21 – 23.

Many new weekends have been announced in SW land over the past week. Here’s an update on where the planning stands:

• Boulder II (March 21-23)
• San Antonio (May 16-18)
• Portland (May 23-25)
• Memphis (May 30-June 1)
• Ann Arbor (June 20-22)

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 the Vosnap Blog, which tends to be a common theme in SW ventures. Vosnap was launched a bit after the weekend concluded, but launched none-the-less (not always something that happens in SW ventures).

Good luck to Boulder and stay posted for updates and results as we get closer to their weekend.

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 the BW site, teams will come together before the weekend and can pick their idea. You can have up to 8 people on your team and then come for the weekend to actually code the project. It can be anything from a widget to a full-blown site. At the end of the weekend, the entire lot will pick a winner.

I’ll be curious to see the numbers of teams and success that BW may bring. Will it be the new style to do rapid-development? Only time will tell…well, time and a weekend of implementation.

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:

• Bloomington (February 8-10)
• Portland (May 23-25)
• Ann Arbor (June 20-22)

More to come as more is known…enjoy!

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 in the element that meetings are not held to disseminate information, rather to actually work on the task during that time.

The ultimate challenge in orchestrating a work group comes in how the group gets started. It’s critical to the success of the group that everyone understands the goal or purpose of the work group. The facilitator needs to explain not only the structure of the group, but also that the group meeting time is a time where decisions will be made and tasks will be accomplished. The true benefit to this style is that members of the team will walk away from meetings feeling something was actually accomplished, rather than they just wasted an hour of their life.

Of course work groups can’t be implemented in all situations. We will still have our need to sit in a circle and share our reports and updates. Here’s my challenge to you with this: how about a standing seven minute meeting? When people are standing, they don’t want to be standing much longer and they focus on getting done what needs to get done.

Startup Weekend really shows that if you spend more time focusing on getting things done instead of talking about getting things done — you’ll get things done! I know, amazing concept. We spent very little time in our product development talking and much of the time doing. Additionally, our 7 minute standing meetings were short, sweet, and to the point. A place where a decision had to be made if necessary, but a quick time to discuss the key matters and get back to work.

Next topic: TBD.

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!

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.

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.

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 company was concerned about the idea we ended up choosing because it was their entire business and they’ve invested millions…I’d be concerned too!

Over the course of about 33 work hours, we broke into teams of marketing, PR, business development, designers, user experience, and development. These core teams worked in unison to make the dream of launching, what would become in this case HolaNeighbor, a reality. There were bumps and bruises along the way, which all companies experience, but we had a successful beta launch of the product in these short 33 working hours, which would normally take a startup weeks, months, if not years to do. I have been working with startups who’ve taken their ideas as far as they can over months/years and still don’t have functioning products yet. Aside from the past three startup weekends, I haven’t heard about a company successfully launching after only a 72 hour time-block in which only 33 working hours were performed.

Now, the skeptics are gonna say, “Sure, you launched, but how much work is left?” Fair question. We are working on the battle plan for development right now, but the business and marketing plans are done. We know through a few short hours where our product stands and now can go feature crazy on it. Over the next few weeks we’ll add some more ‘pretty’ things to it and I’m sure it’ll get tweaked and touched up as the process moves on — but so does every other business. The thing that makes the SW business model different is we actually launched something of quality with some great people in a short amount of time.

Okay, sure — now you’ll think we probably don’t get anything out of it — no pay or anything. Well, yes and no. We got about 60+ of the greatest minds together after sponsorship and the first ever buy-in requirement of $20 to hold your space. All the funding has gone towards paying for food and space requirements (extra tables) as well as shirts for everyone. Everyone came together to work on equity and now is an equal share holder in the company. Yes, that’s right. No one person in the company has any greater power than anyone else. Did we have leaders? Heck ya we did! But they were more so facilitators and gatekeepers for a team to make sure communication was flowing — but their cut is just as much as the person next to them. Once the idea was adopted, it was the group’s idea and no one else’s.

That’s a huge philosophical leap for almost every company I’ve heard of, so think about that, will ya! The idea that your marketing is just as important as development, which is just as important as the person with the vision. Why should anyone carry a greater stake? I’m not sure. SW divides shares based on how much time you devote to the weekend — equally across the board. That’s a big difference in how many companies function.

Conclusion

Start freaking out, because not only do you deserve it, you need to! You are about to battle a new phenomenon that will sweep around the globe and take the world by storm. The notion of starting with nothing and making it complete in a short time frame is coming true. Technologies are allowing for this to happen now more than ever.

I can’t stress enough the idea that this was possible because we were all equals in the creation and entirety. That was and will continue to be the key in business development.

Next topic: Talking doesn’t get a project launched – doing does.

Clarification: I’m not talking about any companies in specific regarding this post, well, except the one who was nervous about HolaNeighbor invading a marketplace with phone calls in the previous week. I’m purely speaking in general business terms from my observations.