Pitching Ideas at a Startup Weekend

Third in a series of posts on Startup Weekend Columbus. You can read the first post about how to be loved by your peers at Startup Weekend here and the second post for developers here.

Some suggestions for how to pitch ideas at a Startup Weekend event:

1. Don't pitch the company as if you are the "original founder".
2. Everyone at Startup Weekend is a founder in the company created at Startup Weekend.
3. No matter how much work you have already put into the project, by pitching your idea at Startup Weekend, you are opening it up to new people and essentially starting over. That is a good thing.
4. Don't try to run the show. Be willing to listen to feedback. Something better might come out of it.
   
5. Lots of smart people go to Startup Weekend events, listen to them, you might learn something and get a chance to build something even better than you could imagine.
   

At Startup Weekend Columbus one of the groups that came out of the Friday evening voting process had 2 idea/business people that had already done a large amount of work to verify the business case, talked with Angel investors and VCs, talked with other companies in a somewhat related industry about leveraging their platform, already architected part of the solution, and generally had done everything except legally establish a company and build a proof of concept. One of these idea/business guys went as far as to say THEY were the "founders" of the company to be established. That immediately made me, one of the people that was thinking about working on the idea for the weekend take a step back and reconsider if this was the right project for me for this weekend. What would I be getting out of the weekend if I put in a bunch of hard work to build these guys a nice prototype? It was clear they intended to continue with the idea well past Startup Weekend. It appeared to me they were just looking to leverage developers attending Startup Weekend to build the proof of concept (POC).

I think after the Friday evening voting the group was formed at about 16 people. By Saturday morning I think the group was down to about 6 people. I think this was all because of the way the "original founders" presented the idea to the group. By opening it up to new ideas or features, by starting with some brainstorming and potentially improving the "proven" idea, they may have been able to get some buy-in from the group and create something great.

This is not to say they won't build something great or that they won't be successful. They seemed to have lots of support from TechColumbus before Startup Weekend, so they have the connections to be successful. This is more just an explanation on why I decided not to work with that group and why a couple other people I met decided to drop out of the group and form a splinter group. Our splinter group ended up working on EventStart. The original group can remain unnamed to protect the innocent. This was all just my opinion and I am not interested in burning bridges. Lots of bright people, it is a small world, bound to run into these people again some day, etc. Loved the idea, didn't enjoy the execution.

Thoughts for Developers going to Startup Weekend

Second in a series of posts on Startup Weekend Columbus. You can read the first post here.

Having just gone through Startup Weekend Columbus last weekend, these were some thoughts I had that might help developers or architects attending future Startup Weekends:

1. Bring a laptop, pre-loaded with the development tools you are comfortable using.
   
2. Create a source code repository on a public site in advance (github, bitbucket.org, google code). For EventStart, one of our developers already had a github account.
   
3. Know your tools, use what you know, don't try to learn over the weekend. If you haven't used git before, don't make this the weekend you try to convince people to use it and then try to learn it on the fly. You have more important things to worry about and learn this weekend - i.e. getting a company launched.
4. Have a public web server host available. For EventStart, one of our developers already had a slicehost account setup. This was immensely helpful.
5. Don't be religious about your development methodology. Not everyone does pair programming. Not everyone is a Ruby on Rails developer. Not everyone uses emacs or vi or vim or TextMate or Visual Studio 2008. Allow the other developers in the group to work the way they are used to working.
   
6. Divide and conquer. Startup Weekend is very intense. Lots of ideas, lots of tasks. Most people that come to these events are extremely bright. Leverage the strengths of the developers by assigning tasks and responsibilities then let them loose. Go, go, go.
7. Remember, the assignment for the weekend is to get something done. This code does not need to live forever, does not need to work for every edge case, does not need to do everything you can possibly imagine. You are building a prototype more than a real, working production scalable solution. Keep that in mind, take shortcuts.
   

10 Ways To Be Loved At Startup Weekend

First in a series of posts about Startup Weekend Columbus.

10 Ways To Be Loved At Startup Weekend:

1. Bring a video projector - want to do pair programming, want to share some thoughts, want to review your slide deck, you need a projector
2. Bring a power strip - whenever you are working away from the office or home, you can never find enough power outlets, buy a Monster 4 Outlet Mini Power Strip for all of your travels
3. Bring an ethernet hub and ethernet cables - the WiFi in public facilities is bound to fail, be dog slow, or be completely unavailable, but with this you can setup your own network to share files with team members anyway
   
4. Bring a Mac laptop - not to be religious about operating systems, but it just seems to make Internet Connection Sharing dead simple
5. Bring a broadband wireless access modem - a Verizon Wireless EV-DO USB modem combined with Mac laptops and ethernet hub allowed our group to keep working while others were stuck without an Internet connection
6. Be the person on the team willing to run to Starbucks to keep your team caffeinated
7. Know the area, know the closest cafe, know when they close up shop for the night
8. Be @TheBeerWench, bring the beer, know your beer, only bring the good stuff
9. Rent an RV for the weekend, pull it up outside Startup Weekend location, let your team members use it for meeting space, but more importantly for down time, naps, and any out of towners that need a place to crash
10. Have fun, enjoy yourself, be happy - remember this isn't your day job, you are here to have fun, push yourself, make connections; this weekend will be a lot of work, but it shouldn't feel like work!
    

Observations on BSG

Some thoughts going through my head on Battlestar Galactica (BSG), with a warning that if you have not watched all of the episodes to-date the observations below may contain spoilers:

1. Single point-of-failure: Are you kidding me? The Cylons have only one Resurrection Hub? The advancement of man (machine)-kind makes this simple mistake? Have they not designed a network or an application with near 100% uptime requirements before? Were the Cylons designed by the folks at twitter? (Sorry, it was too easy.) The end of next season will just be a picture of the fail whale.

2. I have been reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemna. The first part of the book is mostly about corn and how much we have grown to rely on it in the U.S. He talks about the different types of genetically modified (GM) corn and that just a minute amount of the corn grown in the U.S. now is for human food consumption. Very interesting book, but the connection to BSG is that methaphorically the genetically modified corn is like the Cylons. Humans created it, and we think we control it. We mostly can't tell by looking which corn is GM and which is not GM. Many friends have said they are buying all produce from Whole Foods or other organic grocery stores to keep away from pesticides and the dangers of GM crops. In the end, aren't we all genetically modified and isn't all corn genetically modified? Whether by humans or evolution, what we eat today is not what the original inhabitants of North America used to eat. The plants have modified themselves, the strongest or the ones with the best characteristics are the ones that were naturally selected to survive and multiply. It wouldn't surprise me that at the end of BSG we find the humans are in fact Cylons too. Remember, "this has all happened before and it will all happen again".