This past weekend I attended Startup Weekend at CU Boulder. It is
referred to as "54 hours of fun". Startup Weekend is
an event held all over the world.
1. The concept is simple, effective
and serious. You all get
together Friday night, a brief introduction, dinner, then attendees get up and
present ideas. You have one minute to present your idea. Anyone can present an
idea. Once they are all heard the organizer puts them on flipchart sheets and
tapes them to the wall. Then each attendee gets three post-it notes to vote for
the ideas they like most. Once the most popular ideas are selected, the
attendees then select the team they want to work on for the event. All day
Saturday to late afternoon Sunday you work on your project with your team with
input from coaches. Sunday evening you have dinner and each team presents their
idea to a local group of judges. Later the judges decide the top three winners,
and prizes are awarded. This is not play camp. Many people who have attended
these events have gone on to form real companies and launch products. The
concept is so straightforward it can be repeated all over the world.
2. No barrier to entry. To attend you sign up on Eventbrite
and the prices vary if you are student or not. Our event was $50 for students
and $100 for non-students. You also had to choose you classification of
developer, user experience, or non-technical (everyone else). As a product
owner I choose non-technical. As far as I can tell the only question asked was
for student ID for people that choose the cheaper student ticket, and if you
did not have it you just paid the higher price. No one asks you for any
credentials, experience, references etc. You just show up.
3. It is incredibly
informal and open. At this
event these were no barriers to communications between attendees, organizers, coaches
and the judges. Everyone was very free to ask questions. On Friday night I went
around to every team and asked more questions. Everyone was open and
forthcoming with their ideas. Even the teams that did not have a clear concept
yet were very open about the where they were in the process. It is hard to
imagine many project managers saying "we don't have any idea how to
accomplish this, so we are looking for people to join our team with
ideas." Maybe if they did, more projects would be relevant.
4. Showing up is everything. This event is time boxed to
fifty-four hours, so the amount of effort and time put into the teams was
limited. However it was quickly obvious who was going to put in more effort and
time. Since I was acting as product owner for our team, I had to engage all the
different members to get feedback and information. Lack of information limits
any product owner.
5. Successful
product pitches are built around passion No
one got up and said “I have an idea that will make us rich.” Most ideas were
more like “I want to do something about homelessness.” Most of these passion
pitches were made without any concrete ideas included in the pitch. A large number
of these pitches were successful in attracting enough votes to move
forward. Having passion in your product pitch attracts the most
sincere people.
6. You will meet a lot of interesting
people. Since this event was
held at CU-Boulder it had a lot of students. Many people were local, but some
were from all over Colorado. Many of the attendees are people with ideas, but
have not found a way to make them a reality. I had a chance to meet many people
in my area that I would not normally meet, and engage with them on wide range
of subjects.
7. You get to see people at their best
and their worst. This event is driven by personal effort of the
attendees. Once you are directly working with people, it becomes quite clear
who has talent, who has experience, who can communicate well, and who can get
things done. Unfortunately it also becomes clear who is inexperienced, who is
difficult to work with, and who cannot be trusted to get things accomplished. A startup weekend event would be great
preliminary job interview.
8. Social Media plays a huge
role. This event was on
Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr etc. I saw many posts and pictures of
the event online. The final
presentations were even broadcast live using Ustream.
Most teams also had social media associated with their
project. This little event seemed to have more social media coverage than
many commercial product launches I have seen.
9. Different roles have different
values. Most of the product ideas seemed to come from the
non-technical attendees. However when it came time to show your project to the
judges the most important thing was to have a demo, a working prototype or at
least a really good presentation. This comes from your developers and user experience experts. The presentations to the judges that were
mostly "I think homelessness is bad" were not successful. The most
important thing was a viable offering. A working demo on a Heroku site greatly
enhanced the projects viability. Every presentation needs a working demo.
10. It is good to win. The pitch to
the judges is limited to seven minutes, and then a few minutes
for questions. One skill a good
product manager has is the ability to present complex ideas, clearly, in a
short amount time. In the past year I have done presentations to hundreds of customers,
channel partners, and internal audiences all over the world, so this was
straightforward. My team came in third, which was great considering
we had only a presentation. The feedback from the judges was direct and brutal.
However getting positive feedback made the effort worthwhile.
Go to a Startup Weekend near
you. Everyone’s a winner.
