Weekend Warriors of IT

In some ways, it is nothing more than an intensive training session designed to flex some professional muscles. However, there is something quite appealing about Startup Weekend, a three-day mission to create a startup company from scratch.

Dubbed by Drama 2.0 as “Web 2.0’s Woodstock,” the gathering was the brainchild of a brainy child (at least by industry standards), 23-year-old graphic designer Andrew Hyde. He helped gather together about 70 people with a mix of experience and skills—entrepeneurs, investors, software developers, Web designers, marketing folk, and a massage therapist—with the goal of birthing a new company. They assembled above a bike shop in Boulder, Colorado, alternating between small group meetings and yoga sessions to try and achieve their goal, which included not only coming up with an idea but also registering the business with the state, trademarking its name, and developing a marketable product. This, in 54 hours of collaborative work.

The group worked their way down from ten business ideas to three, and then to one: VoSnap, an online voting tool that “facilitates group decision making quickly and easily” through a variety of tech channels. The Boulder Daily Camera posted a nice description of a possible scenario for VoSnap:

For example, Serena wants to get together with her friends for drinks after work. But where? And when?

Serena signs into vosnap.com and sends out a poll via e-mail and text message to her friends, giving them several choices of place and hour.

Vosnap assembles all the replies and determines which bar or restaurant and what meeting time got the most votes and sends out a message to the group letting them know what the plan is for the evening.

“There’s no quick polling application out there right now,” said John Svoboda, the owner of a Web startup company in Boulder who was working on Vosnap’s business development team over the weekend. “One Vosnap message would replace a half-dozen phone calls.”
From “Creating a company in three days” by John Aguilar

Hyde led various groups through the development phase, which included hourly meetings documented on the Internet and three live tests as the deadline approached. A few participants volunteered to work into the night to fine-tune the initial release by morning. At present, VoSnap still doesn’t appear to have a product, however. According to Information Week:

The launch of VoSnap.com was supposed to happen by midnight Sunday evening; unfortunately at 3 a.m. on Monday, the small core of developers still at their screens “were ready to launch *something*” reports David Cohen, one of the instigators of the weekend, “but were crippled by the timing and the disbanding of the group. Nobody had the right passwords to the production servers, or whatever. It didn’t get done.”

Cohen went on to describe a few lessons learned from the experience, including making goals clear to everyone (even those not in the room); choosing leaders based on experience and respect, not personality; and, keep deadlines firm. Coincidentally, IU School of Informatics alum and current Google employee Nathan Rahn just passed along another list of startup advice assembled by Mark Fletcher on Startupping, a community for Internet entrepreneurs.

According to the Startup Weekend blog, the failure to launch on time didn’t kill the project. Core leaders have met twice in the interim and have targeted July 23 as the official launch date. Hyde notes, “What is very interesting to me is the core meetings carry the same energy as the weekend did. Even though the company is now a ‘nights and weekends’ operation, there still is a strong passion to work on and finish this application.”

As I contemplated last week (), I wonder how this kind of mindset and institutionalized activity might benefit our program here at Indiana. Can you imagine putting a bunch of energetic and talented Informatics students in a building with alumni, local businesspeople and professors from other programs with this kind of goal? Startup Weekend is perhaps better applied to this kind of academic environment than out in the real the world precisely because the cost of failure is negligible. The reward from success, though, would be tremendous.