Last weekend, I attended SF Women 2.0 Startup Weekend. At first, I didn’t know what to expect, but I ended up having a blast. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pitch my idea, but I decided to do it while taking a shower in the morning. No one ended up joining my team, and I think it was just wrong crowd to pitch an idea around solar industry. I ended up joining an eccentric geek, H@rlan Knighwood, and worked on his project, ForkThis. He coined it “Massively Parallel Creative Collaboration Engine”, which sounded like a title of a Ph.D. thesis. We had four core members and two floaters, and one of the member and I came up with gentler, funnier explanation, Friendly Online Rapid Kollaboration. What he has is a really cool idea. Anyone can start an idea, and anyone else can take the idea and “fork” it. After many forks, original forker can see what the differences are (similar to diff in unix-like OS) and accept/reject them and update the original idea. The team talked about different business models, but my personal opinion was that first focus should be to make it free and get as many as users possible. A few obvious options would be charging for private collaboration (Github) or charge for packaged solution (Zimbra). Anyhow, over the weekend, I added external forking – scraping external site’s page and creating a new fork – and twitter integration – option to tweet a new fork. Harlan worked on creating javascript snippet for website owners to copy and paste to their sites and massaging format after scraping.
Overall, it was a really cool experience. About 170 people showed up and 38 people pitched their ideas. 100’s of people getting together in one place, some pitching ideas, forming instant teams, and creating product/service and basically starting a company in 54 hours! It just can’t get any cooler than this. Startup Weekend takes a place in many other cities (not all of them simultaneously), but the turn-out in SF should top the list. There are just so many interested in starting a company.
The pitches were also quite interesting, too. Some outrageous, some out of this world, and some really useful. Those with familiar concept (web 2.0, social networking, and twitter) were able to form a team easily. On the last day was presentation and demo, and the one that looked coolest was Foodspotting. They came with something that was already in progress, and thus didn’t start from the scratch at the event. To be fair, Harlan already had working demo he came in, too. However, Foodspotting was probably the most stunning visually. All their graphics were all slick and looked very polished. Whoever there designer was, s/he was awesome. One of the judge panelists pledged $5,000 to Foodspotting in funding before he left.
My philosophy around web sites was functionality/simplicity first and looks second. Perhaps I should think differently about that? Users are humans, and I think it’s something you can’t get away with. Humans are naturally drawn to beautiful things from building to opposite sex. Having an awesome designer is definitely an asset.
Anyhow, the whole 54-hours took me back to college years. Teams of people working on interesting stuff, friendly people willing to answer and help others – not just team members, and overall just aurora of creativity, drive and affinity. Again, I had a blast and I wish I can help host one in Korea as well.
The following is a slide of pictures I took at the Startup Weekend.
Team Members: Harlan Knight Wood, Yang Chung, Tee Chapple, Toya Thomas-Cruz, Olivier Minkowski, John Weiss
Johny and I are interviewed at 8:18 mark