Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (11 page)

If you're an entrepreneur trying to assemble a team, you need to convince the talent to join you. Ask them questions about their vision for the project and what they can bring. Find out more about their background, and share more of yours. Give them all the relevant information they need to make a decision.

Then there are those people who, though very passionate about their ideas, have difficulty when it comes to communicating them. Nick Seguin, Manager of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, says that while it helps for an entrepreneur to be driven, the passion is not going to save you if you can't get other people on board. If you're having trouble finding teammates, “you have to be able to extract yourself from the situation and figure out how to either (1) communicate the vision [more clearly] or (2) evolve the vision so you can get people on the same page with you.”

As we noted previously, your idea will only be a portion of what attracts people to your company. It will mostly be because of
you
—their understanding of what it will be like to work for and with you. A number of the most successful leaders at Startup Weekend have told us that they never turn down an offer of help, and that a successful leader can find a place for everyone on the team. While this is not always true in the real world, at Startup Weekend people do generally come with useful skills and a willingness to work. That's why most attendees don't turn down too hastily anyone else's offer to join their team.

Richard Grote, a startup veteran from Boulder, Colorado, said that Startup Weekend reminds him of working in his father's service station. “If you're standing around and not doing anything, he'll give you a lot of crap. So you just pick up a broom and start sweeping if you can't think of anything else to do. I think Startup Weekend is one of those places you just want to stay useful and busy.”

Nicholas Gavronsky wrote about his experience launching a startup called Animotion at Startup Weekend New York City in the spring of 2011. The idea was to let people create videos on their iPhones that looked like a series of stop-action photographs. He had heard every successful entrepreneur he's met tell him that the team was “absolutely critical.” After the event, he wrote the following on his blog: “Every time I hear this, I nod my head and say, ‘oh yeah, of course that's important’—without necessarily understanding the team dynamics that you need in order to execute.” He didn't know his teammates before they came together, but “from the second we sat down and started working, it was seamless. It was something I hadn't really experienced before, not even in college and the multitude of group projects I had to complete.”

Before coming to Startup Weekend, Gavronsky had tried and failed to launch two other startups. “I finally realize [that happened] because the teams [I built] weren't strong enough. [It wasn't] due to a [missing] skill set or domain expertise, but rather to the lack of chemistry and ability to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. Once you are able to do this—and work seamlessly like we did—it creates a passion and relentless determination to execute perfectly.”

Finally, make sure you are absolutely clear about your interests and plans when you are talking to people about joining your team. Do you want to pursue this project in the long term? Is this just something you're trying out on the side? Do you expect to become the CEO of this company with the other team members working for you, or do you hope that you'll all be partners in the startup that comes out of this? There is no right answer to these questions. While we do think that the CEO model doesn't work as well in a three-person operation, of course, the most important thing is being transparent about your motives and your plans. There should be no surprises come Monday morning.

Chapter 3

Experiential Education

Step Outside Your Comfort Zone While Working Together as a Team

Now you're ready to get down to the work required in launching a startup. Think of Startup Weekend as a kind of education—what the experts call
experiential education
.

One of our core beliefs at Startup Weekend is that in order for entrepreneurs to learn, they must
do
. Attendees are expected to work with a team at each of our events. They are encouraged to use their creativity to brainstorm, innovate, and problem solve, and use their analytic skills to build solutions, overcome obstacles, and meet real market needs. Regardless of whether a person comes from a tech background or spends her day immersed in business, everybody is asked to tap into all of their talents in order to come up with solutions.

The Startup Weekend Core Team spends a lot of time explaining this theory and proving that experiential education works. Yes, it is often messy, and it is pretty much always unpredictable. But when you force people to dig deep into themselves and their abilities, you're able to draw more out of them than they knew they had to give.

The best analogy to this process is probably learning languages. Sean Kean, the former flight attendant and attendee of multiple Startup Weekends, told us that he spent six years studying Spanish and never used it very much. He says he “can't do anything functional in Spanish.” But he spent a year and a half in Japan and is now fluent in Japanese. Coming to Startup Weekend is like “going there”; in other words, it's total immersion in startup culture.

Michael Marasco has set up a program at Northwestern University called Nuvention that is based on the experiential-learning model. He explains his reasoning behind having students actually start up an organization in his class, rather than just looking at case studies of other businesses that have been launched: “We want to help students understand [how] the process [that emerges] from figuring out an idea or a problem really represents the basics of a business—[from the way] you actually build a business around that, to how you pitch it to potential investors.” Marasco explains, “Case studies can only bring you so far.”

Experiential education is invaluable for early stage entrepreneurs. However, it can also be a way of life for anyone in
any
organization. It may require a bit more effort, but most of the people we encounter find that experiential learning is more enjoyable, too. While there are always failures, the successes feel more real, and more exciting. And that is probably because they
are
.

In addition to preaching the power of experiential education at our events, Startup Weekend also walks the talk and gives employees the daunting but exhilarating task of working via experiential education. One Startup Weekend employee recounts her interview with us: “In the beginning, our connection was quite basic. They knew I was a marketer and I knew that they needed marketing done.” But since that time, she has ended up working in just about every area of the company. As she says, “I believed in the vision and the team, and they believed in me. Everything else that has come out of my job since that first interview has been the direct effect of experiential education.”

We try to empower anyone who comes to work for Startup Weekend by asking them to create their own job descriptions. We push them to work outside their comfort zones by experimenting with different initiatives, tasks, and goals. It's exactly what we encourage the entrepreneurs at our events to do. You don't have to join a startup or launch a company to see the power of experiential education. As one of our participants claimed, “Not everyone wants to wants to be an entrepreneur; [however], most people want to [improve] themselves . . . and there is no better way to do this than through experiential education.”

The Importance of Context, Deadlines, and Instant Feedback

There are some very important components that make up a successful experiential education. The first, which advertisers have learned over the years, is
context
. If you want people to understand that they should buy your cupcake, then you should put a sign outside your cupcake store and maybe even show a picture of someone eating it. It's not that people don't know what to do with a cupcake or where to buy one; it is simply that seeing advertisements in context helps our brains process the message more effectively.

In a similar vein, we can lecture people over and over about what is necessary for starting a successful business from the ground up. However, unless they are actually
going through
the steps that are required to do so, they will not absorb as much information. A number of universities are beginning to realize this, and are adding this kind of education to their business curriculum. Once you realize that you don't need to get a degree before you can start a business, there's no reason
not
to start one while you're working toward your degree!

The second important element of experiential education is
deadlines
. There needs to be an imminent reason to complete the task in front of you. Beth Altringer, who teaches a seminar at Harvard that uses the principles of experiential education, explains how the groups she teaches don't really coalesce around an idea until right before their midterm presentation. “A deadline is [helpful] for a group that has a good idea, because it forces them to think it through more deeply. It forces them out of the brainstorming, conceptual phase.” Our deadlines at Startup Weekend may be tighter than most, but we want to move people quickly through these different stages to ensure that they learn from each experience.