

Ask HN: Anyone been to startupweekend? - Killah911

Planning on attending startupweekend in NYC tomorrow.  Any words of advice from your experience would be much appreciated.
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hannesfostie
I've been to two, here's a quick rundown...

Startup Weekend Brussels, #1: january 2011 About 90 attendants, 45-50 pitches.
Some were good, some were bad, some were clones (groupon anyone?). I joined a
great team led by the (then) Brussels director of Founder Institute and had an
amazing time. We ended up second (should have been first, but I won't go into
details) and that was that. He made a company out of it and recently raised
$2m, moving all operations to Sillicon Valley (he is from SV originally, but
lived in Brussels for a couple years). You might've read about it on TC.
Company is Scanadu, @scanadude on Twitter.

Startup Weekend Brussels #2: october 2011 Fully booked, I'd say about 90 still
showed up. If I have to guess, only 25-30 pitches, most were terrible. Ideas
chosen were quite bad, a couple opportunistic people won the pitches which is
okay I suppose. The one idea which I liked (I kid you not: one) was one I had
actually worked on before, before the "founder" disappeared and we just faded.
Pretty good project, but from the pitch I could tell the focus was wrong. They
also had too much interest (well over 10% of all votes!!) and a team that was
too big, so I went home and didn't come back.

All in all, worth trying. Go see what's going on, it could be a lifechanging
experience. If nothing else, you lost some money (or to look at it from the
bright side: bought expensive food and drinks, as well as an office for a
weekend)

~~~
Killah911
Thanks for the info, I'm in startupNYC and it's been an Awesome experience so
far!

------
mpesce
Yes, I've been at two startup weekends (Sydney and Melbourne). They're
amazing. Come prepared to pitch your idea (if you have one) and prepared to
work on your idea (if it gets up) or with a team on someone else's idea.

The winners generally have something more than a good pitch at the end of the
weekend. A demo of some sort says a lot more, to the judges, than a lot of
fancy slides.

