

Startup Weekend failed, but lessons learned - waleedka
http://startupweekend.com/?p=117

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mynameishere
70 days and 2 people would work much better than 2 days and 70 people.

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tuukkah
They learned a lesson indeed: "Development is hard. This is all that will
matter."

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8en
Is anyone else confused by the premise of startup weekend? It sounds like a
fun idea, but the whole concept seems a little silly to me.

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pg
I think they were trying to combine two ideas, "startups are cool" and "bring
a bunch of people together." But not all combinations of good ideas are
themselves good ideas. This was a particularly bad combination, because one of
the defining qualities of startups is that they're small.

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erik
If they had split the 70 into 30 teams of 2 to 3 people, and each team tried
to build their own prototype over the weekend, some interesting results would
have been produced. Put the prototypes online, and have the participants
select the best one through a vote.

That would bring a bunch of people together without violating the "small
startup" principle. Also, completion between the teams would help with
motivation.

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willarson
The way they did it I think 2-3 is too low. They have too many support types:
lawyers, designers, business, public relations, etc. I think they'd have
needed to have teams be 7-10 to fit that many types into a startup. Which is
too many for a startup... so I think that retrying without the deadweight of
support roles might help (not that lawyers/designers/business/public relations
people arn't great, but its hard to perform their roles before there is a
product in existance).

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gyro_robo
> The Java platform was selected

/Nuff

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willarson
If only they'd have a mob of framework elitists to save them from such perils.
;)

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jaggederest
They did! Some rails guys tried to splinter out a prototype at the 11th hour
but were convinced not to.

Now we'll never know whether rails would have helped

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ivankirigin
This is the first I'd heard of startupweekend. They seem to be off on some
basic ideas, as other comments here concur. Throwing more developers at a
problem doesn't usually solve it. A weekend is barely enough time to think
about an idea thoroughly.

But it does sound like fun though. A barcamp should take the idea to the
illogical extreme and hold a startup-hour session. :)

