Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (21 page)

In fact, if you went back just 15 years, you'd find most of the innovation happening in university labs. Some graduate students would be developing a new chip, and if a venture capital firm had a relationship with that lab, the firm might fund the project. Nowadays, however, there are an infinite number of places where innovation can happen. Anyone can code something over the weekend. The investors have to be out there talking to people; they can't just have good relationships with three local science labs.

There is a democratization of entrepreneurship going on today, and it starts with the technology. Having something like Google Apps, or setting up a domain and e-mail server, allows you to have a website up and running in a mere 10 or 15 minutes. Access to tools like these used to be prohibitive for most entrepreneurs just five years ago, but not anymore.

Then there are all the instruments out there that help people who launch companies gain validation. The evolution of online advertising—as well as the ability to send out Facebook ads—leverage your social networks, and gain customer feedback has been critical to this shift in the landscape as well. The cost of getting a set of eyeballs to look at your product is drastically lower nowadays. As a result, even traditional media and marketing outlets have become more accessible. Print media and television want to know what's hot out there, and so they follow the trends on social media closely.

But there are even larger forces at work here. There used to be more of a sense that if you wanted a white-collar job after high school, you should go to college. After college, you would either get a job at a company or get more schooling and become a doctor or a lawyer. It was much more of a rigid structure. However, a rise of the creative class has taken place in recent years, and the startup culture has both benefited from and contributed to this trend. There are all of these questions that people can ask themselves: We now have the luxury of being able to say, “Hey, wait a minute. What am I good at? What do I want to do? I don't have to be a doctor or a lawyer to be considered successful.”

Conversations around the world are changing on this subject as we're realizing that jobs are not always created by big companies. So the dream of graduating and going to work for Google and then spending your tenure there until you can hopefully get a halfway decent management position is simply not necessary.

In part, the Great Recession has caused some of this shift in thinking. Alexis Ringwald, a Startup Weekend winner who travels the world extolling the benefits of entrepreneurship, explains it in the following way: “I think Americans have been shaken out of their complacency. They now realize that not everyone can just become an investment banker, or consultant, but that people need to create their own jobs.”

Ringwald didn't come from a family of entrepreneurs; they were artists and educators. Therefore, the whole concept of starting your own business was foreign to her. “I didn't know anything about business until I was in India [and] I met the guy who would become my cofounder. He was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and that's how we started our company, and I learned a lot through that.” She says that even during her time as an undergraduate at Yale, the idea of going off on your own to start a business after graduation was considered out of the mainstream.

She tells audiences around the world to attend Startup Weekend not only because it's like “going to entrepreneurship school,” but also because it builds confidence: “It kind of reminded me to be more courageous . . . and it made me realize even within two days you can start something that could change the world.”

Confidence is also something that Ringwald thinks many Americans could use more of right now: “A lot of people are being laid off in the U.S. and there are high levels of unemployment; I think it takes a huge toll on your self-confidence when you lose your job. You just think you're not worth anything, your skills have no value, you can't contribute, [and] you have nothing to offer.” Ringwald therefore believes that entrepreneurship can contribute in a huge way to help those people who have been laid off. They can come to something like Startup Weekend and “be reminded that their skills can contribute to some project in some small way.”

Ringwald has high hopes for Startup Weekend: “It just . . . restores people's dignity, which I think is really critical as people are not finding jobs over long period[s] of time and [gradually become] more and more depressed about it.” She thinks that the entrepreneurship revolution that is occurring “can have a huge effect on the national consciousness if it really penetrates some of the regions of the U.S. where so many jobs have been lost.”

And there is real potential outside of the United States. Startup Weekend is not just operating in Western Europe; we are going to countries from Nigeria to Tunisia to Russia to Chile to Lebanon. Creating jobs in these less-wealthy, less-developed countries will hopefully spur their economies and perhaps even create greater political stability. As you may have heard, the world's never been so flat. It doesn't really matter who you are or where you are. We can all benefit from being able to access other people—other potential teammates—around the world.

As Ringwald says, “I think Startup Weekend could be the new form of diplomacy. Rather than sending troops, we should be nurturing entrepreneurs in other countries because when people are starting businesses and starting livelihoods they have less incentive to want to fight wars and cause terror in different places.” We can use American experience and know-how to foster entrepreneurs in war-pending and developing countries. She claims, “It would be great to take the model and really focus on some countries where there's a lot of devastation and try and help people create sustainable livelihoods.”

So, the entrepreneurial revolution is the result of technology, as well as large-scale economic and social changes. But there are other factors at play, too—like the development of a pool of risk capital. Investors are now willing to make bets on startups in a way they have never been before. And then there is also a new understanding of what it takes to make a startup succeed. The work done by people like Steve Blank has ensured that entrepreneurs don't need to just rely on luck in order to be successful. There is a process now and a real understanding of how entrepreneurs can mitigate their risk and grow at the right pace into something great. It is really important to get into the flow of using best practices, to understand how to test things out, and to learn from people who have done this before.

The Entrepreneur Culture

The whole environment for entrepreneurs is changing. The very word
entrepreneur
has become more commonly used by people on the street. While there is still much to be done in terms of bringing other professions into this— in particular, academics and law—a good amount of progress has been made. Big business has even begun to notice where innovation is coming from. Some large corporations are aiming to create a kind of startup environment in their own offices, using some of the tools of project management we talked about in Chapter 5.

However, they have also begun to realize that since startups are so effective at doing this kind of innovation, they might not have to do as much themselves. Nick Seguin at the Kauffman Foundation says he has found many large businesses moving away from large R&D investments and instead trying to acquire the technology created by the startups or even trying to acquire the startups themselves. Yet, these developments also mean that larger companies now have a stake in the startups' success, and have therefore started to pay more attention to this startup ecosystem.

So has the media. There have been articles in every major newspaper and magazine, on every major TV and radio station about the importance of startups. They are often feel-good local stories about how one person's idea was able to change the community for the better. But are those kinds of stories enough to change the culture?

As much as we talk about ingenuity and innovation being part of the United States' DNA, there's still that funny look that some people get when you're introducing your husband or your wife around the circle—in which everybody else is an investment banker or in marketing—and you say something like, “Yeah, he's working on his own thing right now.” It's simply not part of the cultural norm. There are always psychological and social aspects of being an entrepreneur. If we could get a critical mass of people engaged in entrepreneurship, or at least
know
someone who is an entrepreneur, then the barrier to entry might seem a little lower.

Your Next Iteration

Startup Weekend serves different functions for different people. Startup Weekend is helping entrepreneurs reach the next step in their respective journeys, wherever they currently are on the startup ladder. For those who know what they're doing, the weekend offers a condensed chronological period in which to get things done. They know they can access people, focus solely on things related to their entrepreneurial vision over that weekend, and actually launch something. Startup Weekend is the obvious next step in their development as entrepreneurs.

For others, Startup Weekend is a community builder. It's simply a way to meet people, and even if you walk away with no fully formed companies after the weekend, at least 70 people who didn't know each other before now do. And who knows what could come out of that at some point down the line? Maybe a couple of years from now when one person from that weekend gets involved in a new company, he or she will call the team and ask if anyone is interested in a new opportunity.

For others, and this is specifically true when we're running in less entrepreneurial communities or cities, especially in places like Eastern Europe, for instance, Startup Weekend is a proof point that you can work on something and not work on it after the weekend. The culture of which you are a part hasn't really accepted the legitimacy of entrepreneurship, but eventually it might, and you could be one of the early adapters. In the meantime, your experience has helped you learn something about your skills and exposed you to a global network of entrepreneurs. Maybe you'll decide that it's time to explore entrepreneurship somewhere else, or that you're going to be the person who starts to change the culture surrounding you.

No matter into which of these categories you might fall, Startup Weekend will help you try out new versions of yourself. It doesn't just let you change your business model or your product over the course of 48 hours; it allows you to alter how you see yourself. And trying out entrepreneurship can be a life-changing experience.

Seguin recalls meeting four derivatives traders at the last Startup Weekend in New York. “That's a big tough job; you're making a lot of money, and you're not really sleeping that much. But for some reason, these four came out this weekend and stayed up until 3 [AM] and were back at 9 [AM] each day.” The reason is clear, actually: Startup Weekend is a chance to try something new. You don't get a lot of those opportunities in life because of what you're doing during the day or what your commitments are to family and so forth. Your boss might even be upset if he found out you had 54 hours free over the weekend. (We won't tell!)

Individuals trying out new versions of themselves eventually form new kinds of communities. If you spend a little time in the world of entrepreneurship, you'll start to hear people say of each other, “Oh, I met so-and-so at Startup Weekend.”

Over time, Startup Weekend will continue to create loose ties among people who have some interest in entrepreneurship, and it will create strong ties as well. Startup Weekend has formed a kind of nexus of people in communities who are really committed to making the startup ecosystem work.

We all have a tendency to look at the big players in an economy—government, big business, super-wealthy philanthropists—and assume that they will make or break the eventual success of our community and our world. But now there is a willing and able global network of people who are committed to the startup model. These entrepreneurs—all entrepreneurs—are the most powerful force for good in the world.

Further Readings

Note: The following materials are those that we have found particularly useful during our entrepreneurial journey and are not intended to be a comprehensive list.

Books