Sorry to leave everyone hanging after that last post about Startup Weekend, Toronto. While I enjoyed the weekend, hanging out with Andrew Hyde, Erica O’Grady and Steve Poland, being a tourist in a new city, and such, the Startup Weekend event resulted in a lot of lessons learned, and whole new appreciation for the Boulder tech scene and everyone that made SW Boulder an incredible success.

I signed up for SW Toronto because I was very excited about this new concept of Execution that Startup Weekend promised. From the time I signed up, I was a little worried about all the planning that was taking place, but at the same time I also saw a bit of hope that some of the planning might resolve and expedite some of the issues (such as development platform selection and environment setup) that we encountered in Boulder.   It was also the second startup weekend, and I wanted to give it another go, just in case the concept should happen to fizzle out by the time one of the later events came around.

Summary of the weekend:
We got to the event on Friday evening all pumped and excited about what was about to take place. By Friday night around 10:30 PM, we finally picked the idea for the weekend - an idea that thank god wasn’t a Facebook application, but wasn’t all that amazing in my mind - not that my opinion on the excitement of the idea matters - I’m sure just as many people thought VoSnap was lame (and perhaps still do). The first thing I thought of when Lobby Them was pitched was - Comcate - Ben Casnocha’s company he formed for to enhance customer service at the government level. Most everyone left at 10:30 for the night, in the back of my mind we were already behind schedule.

This evening was also the first time I read the SW Toronto founders agreement which turned out to be the biggest red flag of the weekend. It defined the idea of “managers” and “participants” (hierarchy), a skewed company ownership structure to the “management” team for a TBD number of pre-event planning hours, and a huge chunk to the person that generated the idea. A miniscule 15% or so was left for the go-forward team (post-event) which I believed was way too little to incent any future management team to build a successful company and thought it would be a problem in the eyes of any investor. Then there was the Saturday morning confrontation, which basically killed any remaining vibe I felt for the weekend, and by around 12PM we were finally coding and off to the races - way behind schedule (at least they picked Rails!). The whole weekend I felt like I was back in some shitty corporation working for “the man.” SW Toronto lacked transparency (very few group meetings, everyone was segregated in different rooms), and neither was the ownership, the fun vibe, or the excitement.

Like I mentioned in the comment in the last article - I believe there was some desperation and greed that cropped up between the time the Toronto managers decided to do the weekend and the time it all went down. I don’t blame anyone, and I believe it’s easy to fall into this trap - The night Andrew brought up the Startup Weekend concept, I started thinking about all the things that would have to be done to make it happen. I entertained notions of extra shares for special people, I worried about having slackers present sitting around doing nothing but collection ownership. I basically toyed around with the Startup Weekend concept in my head until I developed it into an impossible mess of rules, and restrictions.

I soon realized that if we didn’t let the community of founders decide the majority of the issues at the weekend, then we’d lose the sense of ownership, freedom from pre-defined rules and restrictions, and equality we all had for the product we were creating. In order to go down the path of self-organization (see Barcamp), I believed we’d need to make a lot of decisions quickly, and thus the idea for VoSnap was born. I also we’d have to ignore 20% of the possible annoyances that might crop up during the weekend (such as slackers) in order to focus on the 80% of what’s important - the people that are truly vested in creating something great in a short weekend.

Additionally we were able to eliminate 80% of unnecessary planning with the remaining 20% of pre-event work done on a volunteer basis (no share compensation considered). Finally, being the one to have come up with the VoSnap idea, I personally rejected any sort of additional share compensation for the idea because I believed 1. That ideas are a dime a dozen and not worth anything, and 2. The weekend was not about me and my “awesome” idea, it was about a bunch of people working together on a common goal, having fun, and that to take additional shares would create an unnecessary hierarchy or advantage over everyone else.

To conclude. A lot was learned. I met a bunch of great people in Toronto. I believe for the most part that everyone there had the best of intentions. I had a great time visiting Niagara Falls, Toronto Island, and eating at a lot of cool restaurants downtown. I miss my  friends that I hung out with during the brief time.  I believe the Startup Weekend concept is a huge success, and that Andrew will bring more structure and guidance going forward. I am eagerly anticipating watching the progress of Startup Weekend New York City which goes down this weekend. Good Luck!

We’re having a quick meeting about the day’s progress so far. UI: Wireframes and mockups going well, logos are in progress.  Facebook dev is setting up the app. Dev is coding the rails app, environments are created and SVN is working. We have UI, we have Issues table in database, Facebook is rolling. Things are moving. There are some new posts on Startup Weekend Toronto describing the application and a parallel impromptu effort happening nearby.

Dev has spoken - Ruby on Rails it is. Dev has designed an initial data model, we’re setting up our environments and installing some plugins.

Presentation of the first rev of web pages going on right now.  Quote of the hour: “Does the penis grow as more people vote?” Referencing to a sketch of a interest thermometer on one of the view pages.

By the way, I’m sitting next to Martin, a developer with this cool WiMax box attached to his computer. WiMax is no longer vapourware (canadian spelling, right?). He gets around 1 Meg down and 256 up, the WiMax adapter reminds me of my first Cell Phone - a Okiphone bag phone back in ‘92. Pretty cool.

It’s 10:30, everyone has finally rolled back in, looks like a smaller group now. Team America got here around 9:35 for the managers meeting, was stopped at the door and asked to sign the operating agreement that included distribution of founders shares and facilities indemnification. A discussion of the unique distribution of the founders shares ensued and the need to keep the spirit of SW Toronto. This was resolved in about a half hour. Forms were signed, donuts and coffee are here and now we’re going.

Legal is discussing the share agreement now with the group - addendum being made to give further incentive shares for the go-forward team  from 13% to around 26%, decreasing the winning idea shares and Innovations Toronto shares, and also fixing a calculation error in total shares issued.  Some discussion now on one of the most difficult aspects of Startup Weekend - how to structure the go forward with 50+ founders. How is it going to look in the eyes of investors, if the idea is successful will founders come out of the woodwork and start to participate and want a bigger piece. Change is unanimous with a quick vote.

10:45 now we’re off for real - an architecture discussion about our Lobby Them product. Some of the SW Toronto folks were up until the wee hours discussing the idea and now we’re being brought up to speed. Next we break up into our functional groups to get this thing going. Quick meetings scheduled every hour to keep everyone informed of developments. More in a bit…

We just got back from breaking up into groups. Groups were tasked to do some feasibility planning for each of our two finalist ideas (Lobby Them and Product Ads) on Competitors, Target Market, Revenue Model, etc.

We’re a little over time for tonight but final pitches are taking place. We should have a final vote soon. Lobby Them elevator pitch: “A site that brings community together to lobby change” Talk about integrating Lobby Them into Ontario elections. Talk about crazies using Lobby them, Andrew just brought up the NAMBLA organization.

Auction ads - Steve Poland just got up and is saying they learned in their group that it can’t be done due to the need to have authorization from target sites before linking. Auction Ads idea is dead.

Lobby Them, idea of Alan McMillan wins!

We’re done for the night, reconvene tomorrow at 10am.

So I’m here at Startup Weekend Toronto - I’ve been here for a few days sightseeing and such, and I decided I need to make an effort to document what’s happening. I’m going to quickly breeze through some of this to catch up to where we are currently…

We got here at 6, did introductions, and started picking ideas around 7pm. The organizers had the idea pool narrowed down to about 10 or so ideas. We did pitches for the ideas, and then a bunch of new ones were added which increased the idea pool. We did a vote with paper slips (A rudimentary VoSnap) (four votes per person) and narrowed it down to five ideas (and of course 2-3 more were added after the fact). Pizza and beer arrived, and we discussed the idea among groups to get get opinions among a smaller group.

We just did another vote (two votes per person) and narrowed the ideas down to two: Lobby Them and Product Ads. We’re currently breaking up into groups again to discuss the pros and cons of both, after which we’ll have another quick vote and make the final decision. I’ll write another post as we reconvene.