Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (8 page)

Kesterson's team won the award for business idea most likely to make a million dollars—and to this day, people who attended that weekend still talk about it. More importantly, Kyle had his first taste of life in the startup world. Now, he is the cofounder of a startup called Giant Thinkwell, which builds fan engagement platforms for celebrities and influencers to grow, engage, and monetize their followings through online and mobile experiences. They've moved on from John Stamos to the likes of Lady Gaga. Kesterson is also a graduate of Seattle's TechStars program, an initiative that supports entrepreneurs who demonstrate promise.

Looking back on his experience, Kesterson says, “Starting Giant Thinkwell wasn't even a thought trying to form in my head” before Startup Weekend. He admits that “I had absolutely no network, insight, or understanding of the startup/tech world. Even if I was motivated to start a company that [went anywhere] beyond my freelance design and illustration, I wouldn't have the first clue on how to put together an investor pitch deck, who to talk to, what to take into account when forming a team. I was absolutely green, naïve, and alone.”

The action-based networking that he found at Startup Weekend provided Kesterson with not only a great list of new contacts and a lot more knowledge of the startup world; it also placed him in an energetic world of motivated people. “Startup Weekend was like a
Pulp Fiction
shot of adrenaline to the heart,” he says. As a character designer, he can't resist a cartoon comparison; and he says he felt the same way Little Foot did in
The Land Before Time
when he finally made it to the Great Valley. Kesterson explains: “It instantly made my previous world feel so primitive and out of the loop. People at Startup Weekend were so high on the rush of creativity and productivity and eager to collaborate.”

Getting the chance to meet all of these people from other fields was something that Kesterson says didn't happen for him in school or in his day job as a toy designer. Startup Weekend introduced him to “people on one end of the spectrum from Microsoft and Google,” as well as to those whom Kyle thinks of as being from a “sterile business-to-business environment.” He explains that while he doesn't really fit into that world either, the people who came from those other types of environments “had really interesting ideas about what collaboration with someone with my skill set could look like.”

In fact, many of the people who attend Startup Weekends work at larger companies. While they may feel as though they have unlimited resources where they are, that can be paralyzing in a way—because they start to believe that they need all those resources in order to start up a new company. But they don't. That's exactly why it can be very beneficial for them to network with veterans of startups and work alongside people who have the courage to engage in this process.

Kesterson found people at Startup Weekend who were highly polished, and some who were not; he found people who were into social gaming and some who were definitely not. “It was just this huge array, but it all had to do with technology and flourishing ideas. And everyone is really excited and really open and generous with their ideas.” He says that this kind of openness is something he hadn't encountered before. “This wasn't heavily guarded brilliance”; this was people “just wanting to get as much feedback as they can and really digging. And that digging included finding out what ideas you might have.”

Kesterson says that when he was in school, he imagined that some day he might be successful enough to become a freelance designer, but even in that case, he would just be working out the designs for someone else's ideas. He never dreamed that he could have his own company where he came up with the concepts for what he was designing, too.

Kesterson's educational experience prior to coming to Startup Weekend (which, if anything, was strictly limited to his talents) is not unique—and this is not only an American educational phenomenon. Thibaut Labarre, another Startup Weekend participant, explains that in his experience at the French
Grand Ecoles d'Ingénieurs
, “which are supposed to teach the best and brightest scientists and engineers,” he was not exposed to people from other fields or people who had great entrepreneurial ideas. However, at a Paris Startup Weekend, Labarre and his team developed a website where people could share their insights about what was going to happen in the future. “The goal,” he explains, “was to bring all brains together in order to have the best forecasts about what is going to happen.” Labarre says he would like to make a course modeled on Startup Weekend a part of the curriculum at his university. “Startup Weekend gave me the startup spirit and the feeling that anything is possible when people from different backgrounds work together for a common cause.”

Get Out of Your Bubble

Entrepreneurs have to be different from people who work for large companies. They can't just sit in their cubicle and interact with other people who do exactly what they do or have the same training they do. As a startup veteran and evangelizer for entrepreneurial networking, Bob Crimmins points out, “The most important relationships you have as an entrepreneur are with people who
don't
do what you do.”

Entrepreneurs have to act like CEOs, only with a more hands-on approach. They have to know a little bit about every aspect of business. It's not that they have to be able to step in for the coders if the coders call in sick that day, but they do have to know what is involved in coding. They must develop a sense of how long things take and how the work gets done. However, our day-to-day interactions often don't provide us with the opportunity to see how our colleagues in other departments do their work. Getting out of the bubble of your own field is critical to being a successful entrepreneur. As we discuss later, Startup Weekend has allowed entrepreneurs to be able to look at the entire workflow and see how the whole process can be made better and more efficient.

Many of the project leaders at Startup Weekend like to be modest and say they just bought the coffee in the morning and the beer at night and it was really their team that did all the work. However, that's rarely the case. Keeping the team on an even keel, matching up individual skills with a particular element of the project, and ensuring that people are getting along and having fun while work is accomplished are important parts of being a startup founder. And the action-based networking at Startup Weekend gives budding entrepreneurs a chance to try out these roles.

And not all of the networking that happens is with your own team, either. One Startup Weekend participant, Alexa Andrzejewski, founded a company called Foodspotting, a social networking application that allows users to post pictures of and recommend their favorite dishes (not just their favorite restaurants.) Alexa describes how she came to the event with an idea in mind but didn't plan to fully develop it that weekend. Instead, she claimed a section of a blank wall and started to put up post-it notes with her team members that had design ideas written all over them. As Andrzejewski explains, “We wanted to brainstorm in a really visible way.” And it worked beautifully; other SW participants would walk by and ask questions or make suggestions. “We talked to someone who did market research about how we could do research with restaurants to help Foodspotting [improve], and we talked to a lawyer who told us what's involved in actually starting up a company.”

Andrzejewski got to pitch her idea over and over again to dozens of people, and receive valuable feedback along the way. By the time she left on Sunday, she had a much better idea of how to make her concept work effectively—and she had gotten
a lot
of practice selling the idea to potential users. Though Alexa didn't find the rest of her team at Startup Weekend, the connections she made there eventually granted her access to some initial funding for her venture.

Another Startup Weekend participant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, worked on a project called Rethink Water, which aims to reduce the waste created by plastic water bottles by installing water filtration machines on college campuses. He recalls of his teammates: “Our instant friendship, as well as their passion for the project and our common interests in bringing not only the Rethink Water project but other ideas on the table to market, served to fuel our energy throughout the weekend and to this day.”

Like Alexa, this entrepreneur told us that it wasn't just the people on his own team who helped. “The collaborative and open nature of the weekend was an aspect I thoroughly enjoyed.” He was impressed with the way “everyone was willing to share their work and help others with theirs. We could be wrestling with an issue one moment, when someone from another team would stop by, take a look, and offer other creative alternatives.”

Another woman came to Startup Weekend with the idea of doing something similar to Groupon, but gearing it solely toward women—that is, offering deals on products or services in which women would be interested. As with Groupon, the deal would only go through if enough people signed up for it. So, she assembled a team and sent out messages to all of the Startup Weekend participants asking for their feedback. They ended up changing their model during the course of the weekend to include the idea that a portion of the money was to be given to particular charities, and that they were going to let businesses keep a higher portion of the profits than Groupon gives them. It was a great business model by Sunday, but thanks to all the feedback they got from fellow Startup Weekend participants, it didn't look much like what they started with on Friday night.