Why working at Cubeit is (not) all blood, sweat, and tears
See original post here — http://cubeit.io/blog/2015/04/23/why-working-at-cubeit-is-not-all-blood-sweat-and-tears/
If you’ve ever talked to someone who has worked at a startup, more often than not the conversation would have two different angles. One about how working at a startup means a lot of sacrifice (sleep, food, normal hours of work, and your life in general) and the other about how all the sacrifice is worth it because of all that you learn and achieve working with a like minded, singularly driven set of people.
A few weeks ago, we decided to try something to get motivation and energy levels up. (And no, we didn’t do the traditional offsite to a remote location and participate in team building activities kind of thing.)
The assignment — Take the week off, and at the end of the week present a workable idea to the group, something that each individual would build given the time and resources. There were no restrictions on where and when we chose to work, as long as there was a demo ready at the end of the week.
And the big prize? A smartwatch of the winners choice!
The ideas were judged on two parameters and voting was done by the whole team
- Would I join as a co founder?
- Would I invest money in the idea?
Let’s take a look at what came out at the end of the week. <Drumroll>
Atharva presented an idea for a mobile application which made aggregating and sharing wedding photographs much easier.
Mithun’s idea was to build a localised chat based community where people could join chat rooms and meet like minded people near them, ask a question to local experts, or just engage in banter.
Abhinav worked on a plan to create a social network for entrepreneurs which would aggregate social proof from various sources and calculate a reputation score, thus helping in visibility for promising startups.
Hoosein built a web interface for mobile app developers to upload their app and let users try out features before deciding whether it was worthwhile to purchase the app. Think back to the days of lightweight demos for your favourite video games. This just does it for apps.
Vinod built a lightweight application which allows users to annotate elements on web pages. The major use case is for web developers everywhere who can take real time feedback on designs from clients.
The whole week was a lot of fun, and so was the judging process. The winner took home a fantastic Android smartwatch which he now sports at work (damn you!) and everyone got a better insight into what it takes to come up with a viable startup idea.
The Time Off Hackathon is set to become a regular feature here, not least because we went back to building Cubeit with renewed vigor.
We are now actively hiring for our team in Bangalore. If you think what you have read so far is interesting, please do write to us at careers [at] cubeit.io. We’d love to chat!
