SW Toronto - Recap of the Weekend
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!