Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (18 page)

We put a lot of emphasis on the time limits of Startup Weekend; they are obviously a salient feature. However, it can be helpful to take some time to organize your team rather than diving right into the project. It may seem like you're wasting precious minutes when you do this, but it can really help in the long run (i.e., the next 24 hours) when the pressure is on. You can put the process in place while things are relatively calm, and then rely on it to carry you through when things start to get crazy.

The Missing Pieces of the Entrepreneur's Curriculum

It is not only the way startups come up with a product that is different from big well-established companies. It is also the presence of risk capital. The money that startups need is not some big or traditional bank loan (and they probably couldn't get one anyway.) As Steve Blank explains, “If you went into a bank and said, ‘Listen, I got this portfolio I want to invest in, and 90 percent of the enterprises in it will fail,’ they'd laugh you out of the room. This is a financial asset class that's actually based on taking risks.” The folks who provide money to startups are rare in that they still consider funding these startups to be a hugely profitable enterprise, despite the small percentage of ultimately successful businesses.

It is also the way, for instance, that they are financed. If you come from a well-established, business-world background, the idea that you would invest in ventures with such a high failure rate would have been considered absurd. But angel investors and venture capitalists have pioneered new ways of thinking about these investments. They try to offer small amounts of seed money to spread the risk around, and expect higher returns on the ventures that succeed. Startup Weekend tries to bring in mentors from the world of startup financing to help entrepreneurs understand the way financing works in this segment of the business world.

There are other pieces of this entrepreneurial curriculum that have yet to be written. One important matter is the question of how to hire the right people for a startup. Startups don't have the money in most cases to hire some HR expert. And for the most part, that's not what they need. Looking for cofounders, or the startup's core team, is a vital part of the process—one that occurs even before customer development.

Happening upon the right cofounder is a critical part of Startup Weekend. We talked a little about how to go about this in the chapter on action-based networking. But what are the skills you are looking for? It may sound obvious, but startups need people who are flexible. There isn't money to fund a lot of the frills people take for granted at big companies, and there aren't any assistants to help out. People do their own photocopying and shipping and faxing and scanning at Mail Boxes Etc. They don't ask someone else to do it for them.

There will inevitably be days where people will be forced out of their comfort zones. There's going to be that big meeting where one person was expected to do the pitch but got sick and someone else had to fill in. There will be a project that needs to get done quickly and so the design people are pulled off of what they're doing to help the marketing person. You need people who will work on an idea as if their lives depended on it but then turn on a dime when the customers say they need something different, and work on the new idea with the same kind of intensity. You need people who respect each other and work well together in small spaces under tight deadlines without a lot of money. Maybe there's not going to be a textbook that explains how to find these people, but this is exactly where Startup Weekend can help fill in the missing pieces of the entrepreneur's curriculum.

Chapter 5

Mapping the Startup Ecosystem and Subversive Reconstruction

What does it take to become an entrepreneur? That's a question a lot of people have been asking themselves. Whether you have a steady job, you're retired, or you're just out of school; whether you've been laid off during this Great Recession or you're thinking of marching out of your cubicle on your own tomorrow—how do you figure out if you have what it takes to launch your own startup? Our advice: Don't wait for lightning to strike. Most people don't become successful entrepreneurs because they have a sudden revelation about a brilliant idea for a business model. And nobody is born an entrepreneur, either. Just because you haven't started your own business before doesn't mean you can't do it as early as tomorrow.

Becoming an entrepreneur is a process. It doesn't require total commitment on the first day, and—as with any professional opportunity—prudence is just as important a factor as boldness. Before you hand in your resignation or tell off your boss, before you even clear out your garage to start tinkering and tell all your friends what your plans are, begin by dipping your toe in the water.

A lot of the people who come to Startup Weekend are employees. (In fact, if you want to know why we have a 54-hour time frame, it is because we won't begin a Startup Weekend until people are finished with work on Friday evenings.) They may be high up or lower down on the corporate ladder. They may be lawyers or designers or marketers. They may be you! But most of them think of themselves as people who have a job and a boss, and their goal, at least in the short term, is to get paid more to do that job, or to move up a step into a job that pays better.

But there's a lot more to our lives than that. So take a minute, and instead of merely thinking about what you can get paid well to do, think about what
you'd like to do
and then think about what
you can do well
.

This isn't a fairy tale; we're not suggesting that the life you envision can become yours magically. But breaking out of the
employee box
can be both liberating and can help you make decisions about your career that may ultimately make you happier. Becoming an entrepreneur is about determining what you'd like to do, what you can do well, and then figuring out how to get someone to pay you to do it (in that order). It requires planning, creativity, and some risk.

The entrepreneurial path is actually something like a ladder. Each rung can be harder to reach than the one before it. Of course, everyone will have their own adventures along the way, but we want to help people avoid getting stuck between the rungs. We want people to use the ladder we describe next to figure out where they are and where they're going.

The Entrepreneurship Leap

So, the first step to becoming an entrepreneur—taking the
entrepreneurship leap
—is soul-searching. But it also requires some outside research. Find out as much as you can about the world of startups. You can begin by picking up a

book (oh, right; you already did). There are, however, also a large number of events and projects to help you find out more about entrepreneurship. Check out Global Entrepreneurship Week, for instance. It's a Kauffman Foundation initiative, with almost half a million people in 2010 participating in over 3,200 activities to promote entrepreneurship. High schools, colleges, government agencies, and companies all support these activities, which include virtual and face-to-face events, large-scale competitions, and small networking gatherings. And that's just in the United States. There are events in more than 100 countries with 35,000 organizations around the world that are part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The purpose of these events is not just to start new companies, though many do come out of them; the purpose is to ensure that people have ample opportunity to explore their potential as self-starters.

Other events like this include Ignite, in which participants get five minutes to share an idea with a local crowd. Igniters can meet other entrepreneurs, hear about interesting initiatives in their hometown, and feel the kind of vibe that a room full of entrepreneurial types can offer. Or there's TED, which tries to foster the spread of new ideas through conferences and lectures around the world. There are also business-plan competitions that one can enter to get a sense of the entrepreneurial landscape. And if you want to get a feel for what these events are like without leaving your house, a number of the Global Entrepreneurship Week offerings and Ignite and TED events have YouTube videos devoted to them. But really, you should get off the couch and check them out in real life. It's worth it.

You know you're an entrepreneur when you seriously think about quitting your job, when money is not your main motivation anymore, when you are driven by passion and nothing will stop you from launching something that will change the world!

The Cofounder Leap

We often get the question: Should I come to Startup Weekend if I don't have an idea to pitch? The answer is a resounding
YES
! Only one-third of Startup Weekend participants pitch an idea. While the average guy on the street may think that an entrepreneur without an idea is like a cyclist without a bike, we at Startup Weekend know the truth, which we've repeated again and again: Ideas are important, but the team is essential.

The news is full of stories of the lone entrepreneur who clings tightly to his dream and works tirelessly, for years and against all odds, to prove all the naysayers wrong. We hear the Mark Zuckerbergs praised as tenacious geniuses (and they are); but that's only half of the story. Even visionaries need a team of doers to bring their paradigm-shifting, brand-new idea to life. From mentors to investors to lawyers to employees to fellow cofounders, there's a whole stream of people involved in even the most humble startup. And at Startup Weekend, we believe that the teammates who believe in each other and in a shared vision of the future have the best chance for entrepreneurial success. The underlying concept matters, of course—but only when it stands on the shoulders of a truly stellar group of people who are able to execute!

Since the team is of paramount importance—and will be even more so in the future, when access to technology, information, and resources becomes even more widely available—Startup Weekend is committed to recruiting as many of the best people to our events as we can. Currently, over half of all Startup Weekend attendees pitch an idea at our events; we'd like to increase that number in the future. While only a certain percentage of ideas are selected for team formation, we believe that as more ideas are pitched, the more innovative and committed to the entrepreneurial process attendees become. Certainly, each team can only work on one idea over the weekend. However, if each person on the team has offered an idea, then what does this say about the creative potential of each team member, whether developer, designer, or product manager?

In the future, Startup Weekend would like to do even more to support high-potential teams, regardless of their ideas, as they work to bring their startup to the next level. From our network of mentors, to our partnerships with incubators and accelerators, to our participation in momentous programs like Startup America, Startup Weekend will connect alumni to the resources they most need to move forward.

Ultimately, the best way to find out whether you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur is to meet other entrepreneurs and talk to them about what they do and what you can do. We now realize that this is something of a breakthrough, in and of itself.