Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (7 page)

Because Startup Weekends combine the dual requirements of teamwork and
proof of concept
, people feel motivated to show off what they can do and find out what everyone else in the room is capable of. It's fine for someone to brag that they are the world's best developer or a marketing guru. However, when you watch how five other people work together and see the quality of their output for yourself, you build a foundation for future relationships or networks that is so much stronger than the tenuous (and occasionally, meaningless) exchange of business cards at a bar.

We have also found that it is easy for budding entrepreneurs to become cynical. After a while, you can meet a certain number of people who say they can do things but then don't follow through. Many entrepreneurs begin to feel as if they should just go it alone. They assume that others don't share their energy or passion, or don't have the right skill set. One Startup Weekend attendee named Mike Vandenbos describes how he has been an entrepreneur since the age of four—when he started selling flower seeds with his older brother, making a three-cent commission on each pack. When he got a little older and more ambitious, he became a paper boy and then started a small engine-repair shop while he was in high school. After that, he began a golf event consulting business.

Looking back, Mike says, his one glaring shortcoming was always his “desire to go it alone”—no more partnerships with the older brother or anyone else. As an adult trying to launch new ventures, Mike realized that the stakes are much higher. He has learned through Startup Weekend that he can “walk with other entrepreneurs.”

Other Startup Weekend participants are well aware that they need partners, but they often don't know where to find them. Jesse Maddox learned what a good networking tool Startup Weekend can be when he returned from a trip to Vietnam with an idea for an application to help tourists communicate with locals. He recalled watching the exchanges between the two groups and cringing: “Usually when a fruit seller approaches a tourist, the tourist sees him coming and goes into what I call ‘No mode.’ He shakes his head at the fruit seller, saying ‘no’ over and over, and ends up either erupting in frustration or simply ignoring the person.” Needless to say, the entire exchange is a disaster for both parties.

Maddox remembers that after taking a few language lessons with a couple of locals, he was finally able to communicate effectively and politely, thereby avoiding the embarrassing exchange described above. “When the fruit seller approached, I smiled and said ‘No rôi’ (pronounced ‘naw zoi’)—I'm full already.” Maddox was excited when a huge grin came over the vendor's face; then she laughed and said something back, which he didn't understand. “It didn't matter. In just two short syllables, I'd avoided an awkward situation, engaged positively with the local culture, and had a memorable experience myself.”

Maddox came back to his home in Atlanta, Georgia, a few months later with a business plan in hand for helping foreigners learn key local phrases very quickly. The program would include phrases designed for different types of travelers—businessmen, tourists, and so on. One would even offer instruction on flirting in a foreign language. Maddox sent out the idea to a number of friends and acquaintances in the hopes of securing funding. But he heard the same response over and over: Great idea, but we can't offer you any funding until we see that you've put a team together.

“To me, this seemed like the classic chicken-and-egg problem. I couldn't get a team without investment, and I couldn't get investment without a team,” Maddox says. His experience illustrates what we think of as one of the biggest myths about entrepreneurship—that finding capital is the biggest hurdle to putting together a successful venture. However, as Maddox found, the capital was available, but the investors cared about the people. They wanted to know who was going to be on the team. After all, how could they know that this group of people was skilled enough and could work well together if Maddox didn't even know who was going to be working with him?

Finally, one entrepreneur-turned-angel investor suggested that he attend a Startup Weekend to find a team of people.

Maddox managed to get into Atlanta's Startup Weekend at the last minute, only because one of the other weekend participants dropped out—something he now calls a very lucky break. He pitched his “Triplingo” idea (as he called his business) on Friday night, and it was a hit. In fact, it was chosen as one of the top 12 ideas pitched that night. Maddox easily found nine people to work on his team—including a designer, programmers who could work on both web and mobile applications, and marketing talent. As Maddox fondly recalls, “Our team composition allowed us to break our work into different modules. It meant that there was never a point where we had people sitting around with nothing to do.”

Maddox acknowledges that his plan was very ambitious. By the end of the weekend, he wanted a functioning prototype of both the web and iPhone app. To accomplish this in one weekend, the team he attracted to his idea would not only have to be extremely talented; they would have to be highly motivated as well. The group worked through some difficult problems; for example, a bug in the server program they were using held up their progress for several hours, and they were preparing their presentation until the last possible moment. But it paid off in the end. Triplingo was voted the winner of Startup Weekend Atlanta and it had seed funding to get off the ground within two days. Both CNN and the
Atlanta Journal Constitution
subsequently ran pieces on the company.

Maddox reflects that, “Without Startup Weekend, it might never have happened. Our team would have never formed; I might still be wandering the streets of Atlanta looking for cofounders, and we'd never have our chance to change the way the world travels.” The story of Triplingo illustrates how important it is to create your own team—to get out there and find the right people, and don't wait for them to find you. Otherwise, you'll be on that barstool alone all night.

The Triplingo team's tremendous sense of motivation is not unique. People come to Startup Weekend ready to work. They have set aside this time—away from their jobs, their families, and all of the demands that usually grab our attention. Knowing that the Sunday night deadline is fast approaching turns people into real workhorses.

Tyler Koblasa, the founder of
Ming.ly
, an application that helps people manage their professional networking, says that he found the perfect team at a Startup Weekend: two Google engineers, a former Hulu vice president, a Georgetown MBA, and a lawyer who also did design work. But it was not just the talent assembled at the meeting that made it such a perfect mix for Koblasa. He might have encountered them all somewhere else, “but they wouldn't have been in a room ready to work.” Tyler says that his team had “a super-charged, ‘we want to win’ attitude.”

Breaking Down Barriers

Action-based networking does more than provide entrepreneurs with team members quickly and efficiently. It also breaks down a lot of the artificial barriers that stand between entrepreneurs. Meeting potential business partners through the traditional routes can mean picking people who look like us, or went to the same schools, or come from the same part of the country or the world. However, we all know that these are arbitrary reasons to hire someone or work with someone.

In a setting like the one presented at Startup Weekend, entrepreneurs use the people who are there. They can't sit around and wait for someone they feel comfortable with in a social situation. They have to find someone they can
work
with, and the sooner, the better.

At Startup Weekend, they get a chance to see
how
people really work, regardless of their backgrounds. For people who may be nervous about working with someone with different personal or professional experience, the action-based networking can also provide a kind of low-risk way of trying it out. As one startup veteran explained to us, building a relationship with a cofounder is like getting into a marriage. You will have to spend long hours with this other person, probably in small, enclosed spaces. Each person's hopes, dreams, and finances will be intertwined with the other person's. Once you get the startup off the ground, it will be hard to get out of the relationship if it doesn't work out.

Startup Weekend is essentially a chance to give this marriage a spin before actually tying the knot. Those 54 hours of work give you a chance to see whether things will work out. And if they don't, nothing is lost. At the end of the weekend, you can just walk away; after all, you haven't bought the wedding gown or paid for the catering yet. As one organizer told us, “By Saturday afternoon, if you realize this person is driving you crazy, you know that it's all going to be over by Sunday night—and you can just walk away.”

Another Startup Weekend participant compared his experience to a camping trip he attended in high school designed to get kids socialized; because let's face it—in large groups of strangers, we all tend to act like we're in high school. He says, “Over the years, the teachers had developed a great solution to break down the social barriers: week one was training and prep, and then week two of school was a camping trip (which also satisfied our Phys Ed requirement!). We arrived not knowing each other, but after spending a week hiking, eating, sleeping (and doing everything else) in the woods, it became pretty much impossible to maintain any sort of distance.” Looking back, he says, “Forty people won't necessarily all be friends, but we were all close after that week. In the same way, Startup Weekend throws a bunch of strangers together in the wilderness and forces them to work together, social norms be damned.”

Another participant named Sasha Pasulka compares Startup Weekend to summer camp. “It's not that anyone [went] sailing, or made a lanyard, or got to second base with me before a counselor came around with a flashlight; but everyone in the room that night bonded intensely in a short period of time.” She recalls, “By Saturday morning, I was not in a room full of strangers anymore. By Sunday evening, I was in a room with some of my closest friends in the city.” Knowing very few people in the area before that Friday, Sasha says, her professional network “exploded,” and “so did my grasp of up-and-coming technologies, markets, and potential teammates.” Since that first Startup Weekend, she has worked as a columnist for a startup-focused website, sold a company she launched, and worked as a consultant for other ventures.

Putting people together in environments like the one at Startup Weekend serves a dual purpose. It is a way of mitigating future financial risk, since you'll find out early if your fellow participants are capable of helping you start a venture. It's also a method of ensuring that the startup experience is personally fulfilling. Since 90 percent of startups fail, part of the payoff has to be experience. If you don't enjoy working with your partners, then that experience is bound to be a bad one. If you've worked with them for a weekend, you're in much better shape to evaluate whether you'll have fun working with them in the long term. A few participants build companies that succeed and grow beyond Startup Weekend, and almost every participant finds working relationships, friendships, and sometimes even a cofounder at Startup Weekend.

Taking Advantage of High-Energy, Low-Risk Settings

The low-risk nature of networking at Startup Weekend prompts many people to decide that they can safely expand their horizons in other ways as well. Kyle Kesterson was a toy developer living in Seattle, who didn't think he had anything to learn from Startup Weekend. According to Kesterson, friend and startup veteran Donald DeSantis “described it to me as working with people on building iPhone and web apps and how cool it was, which I just kind of let graze my ears but not sink in too far.” Kesterson remembers DeSantis's efforts to convince him to go to a Startup Weekend event: “I made up all sorts of excuses and ended up missing Friday night altogether, thinking I was just going to bail on the whole weekend.”

At 1 AM on Saturday, Kesterson remembers getting a call from DeSantis, “sounding like he just outran the cops or something.” DeSantis reported that the Startup Weekend experience was amazing but that there were “
no
designers there and that it didn't matter what my background was; if I had
any
design skills or eye for aesthetic, I'd be in high demand.” DeSantis would not take no for an answer.

So, Saturday morning at 7:30 AM, Kesterson arrived at his first Startup Weekend. He acknowledges that the project he ended up working on sounds a little ridiculous: a virtual pet created to look like John Stamos. This
Tamagotchi
, as this type of digital creature is called, was supposed to be a kind of nostalgia item for people who remember Stamos as Uncle Jesse on the 1980s sitcom
Full House
.

Kesterson remembers sketching the creature and then working on its various features on his computer. Everyone else was working on coding or PowerPoint presentations, so most people would walk by his laptop and be a little surprised.

However, many people were also amused and impressed. By the end of the weekend, Kesterson had a pile of business cards, and a couple of job offers. One person even offered to give his portfolio to the director of creative development at Pixar.