Two weekends back I joined over 100 people for my 4th Startup Weekend, this time in San Francisco at the newly launched coworking space cubeSF
It was awesome, I was (as usual) feeling like I should be working but I dragged myself there for the panel on Friday night and once I began talking to people I was able to shed my work-related stress and focus on the ideas people wanted to make a reality. As the Women 2.0 blog summarizes:
Kicking off Friday night, Tina Seelig (author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 and Executive Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program) moderated a discussion between an expert panel about how they would build a company over a weekend. Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work and Founding Partner of Y Combinator), Xochi Birch (co-founder of Bebo – sold to AOL in 2008), Shanna Tellerman (founder and CEO of Sim Ops Studios), Danielle Morrill (Marketing Director of Twilio), and Dan Martell (angel investor) shared their opinions about how to best utilize the short 54 hour time period to build a startup, how to utilize the strengths of each individual, and drew from their experiences to advise the audience on how to build a successful startup.
That’s right – I was on a panel with those fantastic people and it was so fun watching them think of their feet for the panel – where we had to basically go through the process of coming up with an idea, making plans, and answering some tough questions from the audience.
What did we do? How did we do?
I posted over at Seattle 2.0 about how to get the most out of Startup Weekend, and decided to test three things:
- Could I successfully run a Startup Weekend team based on these principles?
- Could I be a little less nice, and get a little more done? (I put a sign on our table that said “If you’re not on my team, don’t talk to me — or anyone else on my team. kthxbai”)
- Could I build the entire front end (HTML/CSS) – my first time being a technical contributor on a SW team?
To see what we came up with check out EscapeMyDate – warning though that it is currently broken because our Twitter account was suspended yesterday in that whole Gov 2.0 expo debacle.
AND WE GOT TEH MOST VOTES – effectively “wining” and getting free office space from Plug and Play in Palo Alto for one month! Yipee
More posts on the event:
http://www.women2.org/what-happened-at-sw20sf/