Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (9 page)

If Not an Actual Startup, at Least Always Build Relationships

Startup Weekend has begun to attract investors and startup veterans to its events, people who want to see what (or, more importantly, who) is the
next big thing
. The world of startup funding can be complicated. Knowing the right people to ask, the right amount of money to ask for, pitching your idea correctly—these are all things about which someone just out of college or who has spent years working for a software firm might not have the slightest idea.

Investors are often bombarded with proposals for new business ideas. How can they know who will follow through? First-time entrepreneurs with no prior track record will have difficulty getting their proposals to the top of the pile. But Startup Weekend allows investors to watch the development of an idea from a pitch on Friday night (a twinkle in the founder's eye) to a real business model—and sometimes even a real business—by Sunday night. Even if an investor doesn't fund that idea, he may find a person he would be willing to back in the future.

Or, the reverse may occur. Danielle Siauw attended a Startup Weekend in Singapore where she pitched her idea for FashionSpace—basically, a site with racks of user-generated fashion magazines, a
Facebook for fashion
or a fashion aggregator and search engine rolled into one. As it turns out, her idea was not very popular among her fellow Startup Weekend participants and didn't get selected for further work. However, her pitch caught the attention of an angel investor. In short order, Siauw says, “I quit my dreary job and found new life in my new startup with the help of Startup Weekend. I am finally able to fulfill my dreams of being an entrepreneur.”

Donald DeSantis, a veteran of a number of startups in the Seattle area, was attending a Startup Weekend in Costa Rica when he met one of the participants, a young man who had his own fledgling startup. Though it wasn't the project he ended up working on over the weekend, DeSantis proceeded to introduce the man to a number of the judges. The participant told them about his own business and eventually was promised some funding for it. As DeSantis relates, the man told him, “I didn't have any relationships with investors. In Costa Rica, it takes a long time to make those relationships, and there is a lot of red tape and greasing of palms. You just completely short-circuited the process for me.”

Former Executive Director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, Rebecca Lovell has come to a number of Startup Weekends to offer the investor perspective. She recommends that Startup Weekend participants try to meet the judges and other guest speakers who are at the events. Lovell likens attending Startup Weekend to “having a passport that lasts a weekend. You need to take advantage of the time there to make strong connections.” She says that many of the investors there are “naturally predisposed to help, but they're very, very busy.” So, you have to make an impression on them during the weekend. You can't just hand someone your business card; you must engage them and create a genuine connection.

It helps that the judges and potential investors at Startup Weekend can see what participants are capable of doing—even if the idea that attendees work on over the weekend is not the one on which they ultimately hope to follow through. In fact, we think that budding entrepreneurs tend to be
too
focused on their actual ideas. We believe that it's the
people
who will make or break the venture, not the idea. As we said before, ideas are a dime a dozen. That is what makes the action-based networking at Startup Weekend so important. Those who attend will meet the people who can eventually determine a venture's success. Lovell also warns entrepreneurs against concentrating too much on their ideas, or thinking of Startup Weekend merely as a place to go to find people to do some free weekend work on their idea. “When people are married to an idea, it can go horribly wrong,” she says.

One of our facilitators, who has worked with other startup mentorship programs like Y-Combinator, says that these types of programs pick companies to support based on the people who comprise the teams, and expect that the ideas will change along the way. “As a facilitator, I look for attendees on the sidelines Friday night who are struggling to figure out what team to join or [who] feel discouraged because their idea wasn't picked. I tell them to just talk to the teams and join one with people who seem fun.”

Diversity of Backgrounds Is Key

Action-based networking is not only important to individual entrepreneurs; it's also vital to the process of establishing an infrastructure of startups in a particular place. In cities like New York or London, entrepreneurship may seem like old hat. But there are plenty of entrepreneurs around the country and the world who need an effective way of connecting with cofounders and colleagues—people who share that startup spirit. The kind of work that goes on at Startup Weekend allows people to form strong bonds that eventually grow into a community. Typically, Startup Weekend organizers have a lot of contacts in their startup, business, and/or tech communities. So, even though the barrier to entry may seem low, the events often turn out to be composed of a very highly motivated and connected group of participants.

And Startup Weekend's international outreach has meant that entrepreneurs looking to expand their horizons have a resource for finding like-minded people all over the globe. One Startup Weekend participant launched a company that provided beach lockers and electronic locker solutions in Portugal. She wanted to expand to France, but she realized she couldn't do it alone. So she came to a Startup Weekend in Toulouse and met “highly motivated people with diverse backgrounds” who helped her develop the plans for how to proceed in other countries.

The diversity of individual backgrounds is critical to Startup Weekend's success, and is necessary for assembling the right entrepreneurial teams. Eric Lagier is the founder of Memolane, a tool for collecting and organizing photos, music, video, tweets, status updates, and blogs—an all-in-one application. Of the two cofounders whom he met at a Startup Weekend in Copenhagen, he shares that one had very little in the way of formal education, while the other one had two masters' degrees. They were from different countries—his original team included people from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Denmark—and Eric is convinced that “under normal circumstances, we never would have met.” He also marvels at the range of ages he found at Startup Weekend—from 20-year-olds to people who already had long careers in the corporate world under their belts.

At the very least, Eric says he could have spent six months trying to assemble not only a team with the right variety of skills but who also had a willingness to work with him on his project. “Those guys could have spent their weekend drinking and partying and whatnot. But they decided to spend it at Startup Weekend instead.”

And it was not only his own team that came together like this; Eric has watched others, too. He speaks of one business development marketer who met a project manager with whom he created a successful startup. Looking back, Eric said that “a lot of energy was unleashed” when the two of them worked together.

Alexa Andrsejewski said she had a similar experience of finding a wide array of people at Startup Weekend. “I was a user-experience consultant,” she says, “and I looked around at my network and realized that everyone I knew was also a user-experience person, which meant that all the people she knew could only fill one of the roles at Foodspotting. Alexa didn't know any investors or developers; as she half-jokes, “They go to developer camps, and things like that.” One of the reasons she came to Startup Weekend was for “cross-pollination.” Though Foodspotting didn't win the competition that weekend, one of the judges offered to give her team $5,000 after the competition was over—and subsequently provided a lot of advice about getting further funding.

How Do You Keep the Momentum Going?

One question we constantly ask ourselves is how to make Startup Weekend's atmosphere last in a community, even after the weekend is over. We don't think it's a coincidence that many of our participants are developing applications and programs that help people stay in touch and put like-minded people in contact with each other. The trend toward coworking spaces is an important development. The idea of people doing projects alongside each other, in person and in real time, will continue to encourage the kind of contact and action-based networking that begins at Startup Weekend.

When Tyler Koblasa noticed that something called “Coloft” opened up in Los Angeles, he suggested doing a Startup Weekend event there. “People know that they're going to be around this community and can find what they're looking for.” Coworking spaces, he says, “are a critical component of catalyzing Startup Weekend because it becomes not just about those three days. It's about everything leading up to the event and what happens afterward.” Tyler has even started sponsoring a monthly event there where people pay $10 to come work on a project from 7 PM to 2 AM for one evening with other attendees. “We want to [establish both] a feeder to Startup Weekend, and a support network afterward.”

Action-based networking is an intensely local phenomenon. Not only do you need to be able to see people and talk to them; you need to be with them for hours, if not days, at a time. But that kind of local networking can also be expanded. There are people who come from out of town for our events and people who meet their cofounders and investors and colleagues through our extensive national and international network. You can take the knowledge you gain from other people at Startup Weekends and transform something local into something global.

For the past couple of years, a number of Startup Weekend team members have gone to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, Texas. SXSW is not just a good place for us to meet energetic, independent-minded people. It's also an excellent model for Startup Weekend. If you think about it, people who make music or produce art or movies may attend cocktail parties or go to film school together. However, an event like SXSW or the Sundance Festival truly shows them what they are capable of doing. People come to those events with the knowledge that they will be able to see talent in action. The effects of South by Southwest reverberate for the rest of the year in both the United States and in the global music industry.

As unique and intense as the Startup Weekend experience is, we also think it has broader, long-term implications. As people take the lessons of Startup Weekend and apply them in their own communities and spread them throughout a variety of places and industries, we hope they will become an integral part of an entrepreneurial revolution.

Chapter 2

Good Ideas Need Great Teams

Pitch for Talent Not for Funding

It's Friday night at 9 PM, and you're in a room packed with strangers. The boxes of pizza were emptied long ago and are now piled up in a corner, but a few people are still clutching (albeit warm) beers. It's loud in this Manhattan loft space. It's hot, too, and frankly, people are starting to smell a little. But you hardly notice. And you
definitely
don't make a move for the door. Instead, you try to carry on intense, vocal-cord-straining conversations about business ideas and computer coding, advertising and customer bases, venture capital and what entrepreneurial success looks like. You search, sometimes in vain, for the people you watched a few minutes ago trying to sell you their ideas. And you try to find people who are interested in your ideas. You are holding up pizza boxes with the name of your future company, writing with magic marker on the backs of paper plates and throwing them like Frisbees into the crowd—doing anything you can to make yourself stand out in this chaos.

Just a few minutes ago, there was some order in this room. You were patiently lined up along the wall with 30 other people, waiting to pitch an idea for a new business in 60 seconds. Even after 75 pitches, there was virtual silence when each person began to talk. When you looked over at the line snaking down the hall, you saw some people fidgeting, tucking in their shirts, and smoothing out their hair. Some were taking notes. Others were trying to memorize lines like they were auditioning for a Broadway play.

And you were asking yourself some questions, too: Should you try to be funny or serious? Who should you look at? Should you tell them about what you do during the rest of your life? Will anyone care? Should you mention how many other events like this you've come to? Will your accent be too heavy? Will you talk too loudly or not loudly enough? Sixty seconds, you begin to think, just isn't very long.

The Magic of 60 Seconds

When we set out to design the course of events at Startup Weekend, we didn't just pick 60 seconds arbitrarily to give people a hard time or because we like seeing that look of panic come over their faces when they notice the clock running out (though it is a little funny.) We wanted to be practical: No one would be able to go home on Friday night if we let all the people who wanted to pitch ideas go on any longer than that.

However, there was an even more important reason: 60 seconds is about the length of time you have in an elevator to explain the concept of your company to a total stranger (even less, if you get out on a lower floor). After that minute is up, you'll start to lose someone's attention. Even if you have a scheduled meeting with someone that's longer, the advice your seventh-grade teacher gave you is right: The topic sentence and the introductory paragraph need to be great. People will tune out if you can't grab their interest with the first few words that come out of your mouth.