Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (4 page)

Most people would think twice before taking this plunge. After all, you've been working on this idea for such a long time—and it is
such a good idea
. What would happen if the people who walked away decided to steal the idea and use it to start their own company? Or what if the people who wanted to work with you really wanted to take the idea in a new direction and it didn't end up looking the way you had imagined?

At Startup Weekend, we have two words of advice for you:
Let Go
.

Every weekend at events around the country (and around the world), budding entrepreneurs come together to share their ideas—their
babies
—with people they have never met before in the hopes of making these fuzzy plans a reality. Trusting others completely—for their feedback, their advice, and their help—is the only way to accomplish this.

It used to be the case (before we took over) that people attending Startup Weekends had to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDA), promising not to reveal the ideas they learned about to anyone outside. This model did not really sit well with us or with many of our participants. A few people actually left an event early because of the NDA requirement, and went to a nearby coffee shop instead—where they had their own little Startup Weekend. That's why, to this day, we prefer to operate in a kind of open-source mind-set.

Of course, it takes people some time to get used to this attitude. People are often hesitant in the first couple of hours of a Startup Weekend, and will only share a little bit of their idea. They approach others tentatively, inquiring about their skills but also holding back information, while offering only a proxy of their idea. Most people are also a little nervous about whether their idea is good enough—since they have barely exposed it to the light of day, let alone the critical minds of a hundred strangers.

But then, something changes. They see one person doing it—explaining the whole idea, openly, honestly, trustingly—and they ask themselves: Really, what's the worst that can happen? You'll get some negative feedback? That's a
good
thing. If there is a fundamental flaw in your business model, or if someone has done this before, then you'll find out and you can move on with your life, and to the next idea.

Pretty soon, people start to trust each other with their ideas, and the whole room begins to exude energy. It's like watching popcorn pop. People start heating up with the passionate thoughts and plans they've been keeping inside. The bowl, as it were, becomes filled, with fresh, hot ideas. It's one of our favorite moments.

As codirectors of Startup Weekend, we like to say: “There are no brilliant ideas, only brilliant execution.” Or, as one of our Startup Weekend attendees, Jerry Suhrstedt—CEO of Northwest marketing agency Heavy Guerrilla—put it recently, “Ideas are a dime a dozen.”

If none of that makes sense, then think about it mathematically, and consider the following example. Someone who was working on an idea alone came to us a while back. He was trying to start a business for months while keeping it a secret; at one point, he was running out of cash. “I'm in big trouble,” he confessed to us. “I don't have enough money to turn this idea into something.” We told him it was time to take his idea out of hiding. After all, if you don't talk about your idea to anyone, the probability of finding a customer or an investor is zero.

One participant at a Startup Weekend in Olympia, Washington, really understood this notion. After attending one of our meetings, he wrote to us that by the end of Friday night, a group of 40 people had come up with 10 excellent ideas for marketable products and services. He explained, “From Red Panda [an energy drink marketed to yoga studios] to Drunk Test [an iPhone app that would test your level of cognitive function with a series of questions], all of the ideas could be worth pursuing, if someone had the motivation or interest.” Of course, as he quickly realized, “Coming up with ideas is easy. The next [and more difficult] step is
doing
something about it.”

In fact, a lot of our participants have found that it's actually easy to get stuck in the brainstorming phase. This doesn't surprise us; coming up with ideas is fun, as is telling other people about your ideas and getting their feedback. As the same participant observed, “This process of generalizing an idea, adapting it slightly, and then refocusing on the new idea is something that the human brain is optimized for.” It's easy to just keep doing that over and over again; but it's not a very good way of creating a functional startup. The key to the startup is to, well,
start
. Just pick an idea—any idea. They're all good. And then get to work.

We have found that that famous Nike slogan—
Just Do It
—might apply to launching companies even more than it does to accomplishing athletic feats. Another participant, Willy, told us that the first time he attended a Startup Weekend, he had an idea but decided not to pitch it to anyone. He explained, “I'm rather quiet and shy, so I first chose not to pitch. [I felt there were] too many folks looking and listening and judging. It was just too much. In fact, I hardly had the courage to attend the weekend.” But after listening to a few of the pitches, Willy decided it was worth the risk. His idea didn't sound worse than any of the other ones: “So I gathered all my strength and went on stage, which I did regret for some
very
long seconds. But there I was. I won't tell you it was easy, because it wasn't. I stammered; I lost the perfect sentences that I'd prepared; and I'm 100 percent sure lots of people thought: ‘God, this is crap. What does he want to do?’ But, hell, I had wonderful feedback about my ideas.”

How Trust Led Us to the Greatest Adventure of Our Lives

It's not easy to trust that other people will listen openly to your ideas and then help you improve on them. But it's the way Startup Weekend began.

In the spring of 2009, we—just a couple of unemployed Seattle-based marketers—went on a road trip. One of Marc's former colleagues had gotten a job in Qatar and needed to sell his car in Seattle, Washington, so Marc offered to drive the car from Seattle to the new owner in Denver, Colorado. He called up Clint (who didn't really have much to do at the time), and within a couple of hours, we were on the road.

One year earlier, we had participated in a Startup Weekend in Seattle. At the time, Startup Weekend was a for-profit company that charged people about forty dollars to attend events. The events had corporate sponsors; everyone in attendance worked on one project together and the participants were offered a form of stock options when the weekend was over. However, this model wasn't working very well. The company was losing money, and the SEC wasn't very happy about the stock options part either.

So, we got to talking about ways the model could be improved. A couple of hours outside Denver, on what turned out to be a life-changing road trip, Clint told Marc that he had a phone number for Andrew Hyde, the then-CEO of Startup Weekend in Boulder, Colorado. We called him on a lark and stopped by, and Andrew was all ears. He was more than supportive. And then he did something pretty amazing; he said, “Why don't you guys just go ahead and take Startup Weekend over?” We were more than a little taken aback by the level of openness and willingness he had to let us run with it. After all, he didn't know us from Adam. However, we were also thrilled—and were 100 percent ready to take him up on his offer.

We flew back from Denver and immediately sent Andrew a proposal. We worried that if we waited too long he'd probably change his mind. But he got the proposal, told us it was great, and then gave us the keys to the business.

The story of how we became involved emphasizes the principles of trust and empowerment, which were the foundation of Startup Weekend from the beginning. Andrew decided to trust two young guys who just showed up on his doorstep one day. He didn't know us well. But his attitude on his method was, “If these guys do a good job, great. If not, I can always take it back from them.”

It then quickly became a question of whom
we
could trust. As two guys who were trying to build something, we realized that Startup Weekend could only be successful if we did it on a large scale. We didn't pay ourselves for six months. We were living in a condo together and were absolutely broke. We knew that the key to getting support for the enterprise was to expand it—but how? We couldn't do it by managing every event ourselves. Not only was that logistically difficult, but we also didn't know every city well enough to get the right people to show up.

Should we really be responsible for the entire event budget and all logistics, everything from A to Z? Yes, we might make more money personally; but it would be a significantly higher amount of work and the events wouldn't turn out as well.

At the first Startup Weekend we hosted in San Francisco, California, Franck showed up. He heard about our endeavor from a friend and had just flown in from Paris that day. He was completely exhausted, but he loved the atmosphere. He had been involved in startups himself and had an engineering background. So by the end of Friday night, he had convinced us that he should host an event in France. Who would have thought?

Franck Nouyrigat

In 2008 I did a one-year world tour with the goal of finding the best place to launch my new startup venture (I ended up choosing the United States). After my world trip, I spent six months saving money in order to be able to launch. When I met Marc in San Francisco in 2009, I was working on an iPhone application that went on to raise micro-venture capital. I met Clint later on, in France, and we became very good friends. A month after working for fun with Marc and Clint on Startup Weekend strategies I ended up in Seattle, Washington. This was where I made the decision of a lifetime. Marc, Clint, and I were the perfect team and we were working 24 hours a day on Startup Weekend. But Startup Weekend was very fragile. I made the decision to jump off the cliff with them—instead of pursuing my own ideas alone, I decided to make a donation of the money I was saving for my own company to Startup Weekend. This gave my family and friends some doubts, but I was completely confident. I had no doubt that Startup Weekend was going to be huge. You can't be an entrepreneur if you don't take risks, especially when the future is uncertain. While I realize how lucky I was to meet Marc and Clint as friends, I also think they're the only people in the world with whom I would want to work.

For the first several months, the three of us were flying everywhere to organize these weekends. I spent a year sleeping on one side of a couch and working on the other side while Marc and Clint were working furiously on the other side of the room. But the model of doing it ourselves wasn't sustainable in the long run. For one thing, we didn't know enough about every city's community of potential entrepreneurs to run truly successful events everywhere. One of the important features of Startup Weekend is that it can adapt to the culture around it. If a city is more traditional, Startup Weekend will provide formal nametags or slightly different food. But you have to know a particular place's culture in order to realize who should be there and how to make the participants most comfortable.

Marc, Clint, and I knew we were going to have to trust other people who were familiar with specific locations in order to guide the operation as we expanded to new locations. We relied on volunteers on the ground to help us, many of whom had previously participated in a Startup Weekend and wanted to bring it to their own hometowns. The whole enterprise grew organically to the point where now we were getting several e-mails a week from people asking if they could host a Startup Weekend themselves.