I think I’ve finally recovered from the intense weekend which was Startup Weekend. What an amazing event, and one that I will continue to participate in down the road. While we didn’t meet our goal of having something live at the end of the weekend, I’d say we’re about 80% done (damn that last 20%).

What We Made:

• VoSnap, a tool that allows a quick vote amongst a group through email or SMS.

What Worked:

• The people. Only in the last seven months or so have I discovered the tight Boulder tech scene. It was great to work side by side with everyone on a common goal.
• Andrew Hyde - Great leadership, organization, and moderation of 7 minute status meetings and overall Startup Weekend flow.
• It was amazing to have all the various departments working in parallel. It was so cool to be working on a server or some code, and then realize at the next hourly meeting that PR had developed some new press releases, Biz Dev had come up with some new monetization models, Creative with some new logos banner ads, or funny videos, and Legal, hard at work researching trademarks, SMS rules, incorporating the company ten different ways, and coming up with founder equity agreements.
• The idea (if I do say so myself ). One of the coolest parts of startup weekend was seeing everyone in the room begin to understand the concept and the bigger picture. It was like a snowball effect - as momentum increased, understanding grew and and deliverables that were being produced by each of the different teams followed a common vision. I believe the original concept was well suited for the number of people in attendance, did not require specific knowledge about any field in general, was of a scope that could be completed in a weekend, and would, in the end provide benefits to Startup Weekend itself.
• Feedback and support from the world, including posts on the Startup Weekend blog, press, TechCrunchings, our live-stream viewers and all the other positive feedback we received during our startup weekend
• Startup Weekend is about execution. I’m tired of panel discussions, and passive entrepreneurship. There is a time and place for these things, but they tend to dominate the scene.
• Seventy-two people for a weekend smells of chaos and disaster, especially when you consider the mythical man-month and conventional wisdom of that sort, which ended up being a non-issue for Startup Weekend.

What Needs Work:

• Dev platform selection: Justin Shacklette nailed it right on the head in his comment on Brutal Honesty, a Failure and a Success. “…any random sample of web 2.0 programmers will include more Java than Ruby. But, and this is important, all Ruby web devs know the Rails framework. Java, and Java framework knowledge, is just too broad. You can have someone with 5 years experience on Struts, than doesn’t know anything about Spring Web Flow. And there is another tricky Java speed bump around tooling. A veteran Java dev may never have used Maven 2…for example.” I feel too many would be developers (myself included) were unable to contribute due to insufficient knowledge of Java framework(s)”
• VoSnap. We’re working on it. We’ll get it done, and we’ll get it done soon. And it will be awesome.

I’ll continue to update this blog as more VoSnap developments occur, until then…

VooooooooooooooSNAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 11:05 am and is filed under Discussion, Entrepreneurship, Ideas, VoSnap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.