Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat Read Free Book Online Page A

setting like the one presented at Startup Weekend, entrepreneurs use the people who are there. They can't sit around and wait for someone they feel comfortable with in a social situation. They have to find someone they can work with, and the sooner, the better.
    At Startup Weekend, they get a chance to see how people really work, regardless of their backgrounds. For people who may be nervous about working with someone with different personal or professional experience, the action-based networking can also provide a kind of low-risk way of trying it out. As one startup veteran explained to us, building a relationship with a cofounder is like getting into a marriage. You will have to spend long hours with this other person, probably in small, enclosed spaces. Each person's hopes, dreams, and finances will be intertwined with the other person's. Once you get the startup off the ground, it will be hard to get out of the relationship if it doesn't work out.
    Startup Weekend is essentially a chance to give this marriage a spin before actually tying the knot. Those 54 hours of work give you a chance to see whether things will work out. And if they don't, nothing is lost. At the end of the weekend, you can just walk away; after all, you haven't bought the wedding gown or paid for the catering yet. As one organizer told us, “By Saturday afternoon, if you realize this person is driving you crazy, you know that it's all going to be over by Sunday night—and you can just walk away.”
    Another Startup Weekend participant compared his experience to a camping trip he attended in high school designed to get kids socialized; because let's face it—in large groups of strangers, we all tend to act like we're in high school. He says, “Over the years, the teachers had developed a great solution to break down the social barriers: week one was training and prep, and then week two of school was a camping trip (which also satisfied our Phys Ed requirement!). We arrived not knowing each other, but after spending a week hiking, eating, sleeping (and doing everything else) in the woods, it became pretty much impossible to maintain any sort of distance.” Looking back, he says, “Forty people won't necessarily all be friends, but we were all close after that week. In the same way, Startup Weekend throws a bunch of strangers together in the wilderness and forces them to work together, social norms be damned.”
    Another participant named Sasha Pasulka compares Startup Weekend to summer camp. “It's not that anyone [went] sailing, or made a lanyard, or got to second base with me before a counselor came around with a flashlight; but everyone in the room that night bonded intensely in a short period of time.” She recalls, “By Saturday morning, I was not in a room full of strangers anymore. By Sunday evening, I was in a room with some of my closest friends in the city.” Knowing very few people in the area before that Friday, Sasha says, her professional network “exploded,” and “so did my grasp of up-and-coming technologies, markets, and potential teammates.” Since that first Startup Weekend, she has worked as a columnist for a startup-focused website, sold a company she launched, and worked as a consultant for other ventures.
    Putting people together in environments like the one at Startup Weekend serves a dual purpose. It is a way of mitigating future financial risk, since you'll find out early if your fellow participants are capable of helping you start a venture. It's also a method of ensuring that the startup experience is personally fulfilling. Since 90 percent of startups fail, part of the payoff has to be experience. If you don't enjoy working with your partners, then that experience is bound to be a bad one. If you've worked with them for a weekend, you're in much better shape to evaluate whether you'll have fun working with them in the long