Pressure-cooked ideas become gems during boot camp for entrepreneurs
If you had a spare 54 hours to kick around, what would you do?
Watch entire series of Game of Thrones, Deadwood and Twilight back to back? Run an ultra marathon? Clean out your gutters and those of 24 close friends?
How about packing yourself into a room with halfa-dozen strangers and building a business from an idea that you had in the bath?
Startup Weekend, which is in its third year, is in full swing in New Zealand, with the Auckland event last weekend at Massey University’s Albany-based business incubator eCentre.
With four events in three cities and counting, Startup Weekend keeps getting better, and there is nothing but upside from the energy it inspires.
In a nutshell it’s a boot camp to turn good ideas into muscle and traction. About 100 people work the open mic on the Friday night, putting business ideas to the room.
Ideas with the most votes amass teams around them. Fast forward through the next 50 hours (a medley of billiondollar aspirations, spirited arguments, high fives, patchwork business models and hurried customer surveys) to Pitch Night at 5pm on the Sunday.
A panel of investors and businesspeople face the teams and the judging begins. Some pitches show businesses that have built prototypes, signed up customers and started a cashflow stream inside a weekend.
Other pitches show different experiences from the weekend, a few not so pretty.
The Auckland winner, Smile Today, is packing charity into happiness, runner-up JumpOnBoard is pushing collaboration into travel planning.
Filtering freak flatmates, doing a PhD on the bus, wrapping virtual shopping in a virtual bow; all ideas being stretched, kicked and bent into a business model and tested.
It’s like Game of Thrones with whiteboard markers instead of swords.
Drama is inevitable, factions form and alliances emerge, passion fires and ideas clash. It’s inspiring. Some splinter and regroup better for it, others lose the plot and find their solace in another team.
As amentor, you add as much as you can and they take on board what they will and there are some you just can’t help. There’s no time for philosophical discussions.
A Startup Weekend’s essence is the fact that pressure matched with the right support makes things work.
Startup Weekend facilitator and Wellington investor Dave Moskovitz boiled it down.
‘‘Startup Weekend is about inspiring entrepreneurs. That’s it.’’
Inspiring them to do what? That looks different to every person on Friday night, and different again on Sunday.
But if 54 hours on the clock inspires you to do anything, it’s to execute something.
On a macro scale, the more of this we can inspire, the better we do. Startup Weekend’s catchline?
‘‘No talk all action’’. It sounds cliched till you’ve seen it working.
There are countless ideas that languish in heads, on cocktail napkins, scratched on school desks, or notebooks in garages. If you know what I mean, set your watch to 54 hours and set yourself to it. See what you’ve got at the end of it. Better yet, bring it to Startup Weekend.