StartupWeekend is(n’t) dead, long live StartupWeekend
Last night, Mike van Hoenselaar published this article, proclaiming:
“StartupWeekend is dead, long live StartupWeekend”
and this is my response to why this isn’t the case. It’s probably worth noting that Mike and I do know each other in real life, but mostly communicate via Twitter/Facebook.
As a disclaimer, yes, I am a Facilitator for Startup Weekend, an unpaid role which I undertake on a voluntary basis. Part of that role is to evangelise the organisation and spread the word - but, the following should be considered my own opinion, not an official communique on behalf of Startup Weekend, who may disagree with me.
StartupWeekend. A phenomenon in the world if you are talking about startups and improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world. If you are not familiar with StartupWeekend: You are building a new company in 54 hours to become the new Dropbox, Google or Apple, so they preach. I will explain later why that isn’t the case.
Note - these are Mike’s words, not those of Startup Weekend who describe themselves as: Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.
StartupWeekend is dead. Long live startup weekend.
A new StartupWeekend Amsterdam is about to take place (July 5-7). For me the third one I will participate in and later this year maybe the 4th will follow in Utrecht. I was thinking about my endeavours at StartupWeekend so far and thought in particular of the previous StartupWeekend Amsterdam and found 3 reasons why StartupWeekend should pivot as well.
Get on stage
You step on stage telling people about your dream.
At events I facilitate, approximately 55% of the attendees will pitch an idea. 45% of the attendees do not pitch an idea.
My goal was to build a platform where authors can build their books online and with a press of a button they would export their book to all the important formats and have an app in the App Store and Google Play Store. It even would make it possible for readers to get in contact with other readers and the author while reading the book. Something every author and reader wants in my opinion. I validated it beforehand as well.
So far, so good.
Vote for an idea
After all the pitches people can vote on their favorite idea. The ideas with the most votes are selected to continue and start the best 54 hours to kickstart a company I ever experienced. Hear me say kickstart here, remember that.
This voting process has various purposes, mostly to ensure that people get to work on something that they want to work on, but it’s also an early form of validation. For example, insufficient votes tells you that there’s something wrong with your idea, or your ability to sell it.
People help you build your idea
I talked to a lot of people about my idea and people were enthusiastic about it. After I got enough votes for my idea my head was in the clouds obviously. The next step was getting the right people in my team. You are put against the wall in the room waiting for people to come to you and ask to join your awesome idea and rule those 54 hours. A lot of people got their team right away. I didn’t. Nobody came.
So - lots of people were enthusiastic, and enough people voted, but Mike couldn’t make a team. The question to ask is “what went wrong, what changed?”. Mike’s experience isn’t unique. I don’t know why, in his case, Mike couldn’t build a team, but, there’s a few common factors:
- The idea is cool, people want it to exist, but don’t actually want to work on it. Not much you can do here, but it’s a great indicator that there’s a problem with the idea.
- You were able to explain the idea in 60 seconds, but couldn’t talk to people in a way that made them want to work with you. This usually happens when the idea pitcher is too aggressive with their management tone, is too wishy washy about how to proceed or is just unable to interact with other people.
- The people in the room didn’t have the skills needed to build the idea/concept/company. It happens. I worked on an idea that needed facial recognition technology. There was no such person in the room. We proceeded anyway.
- You stood still waiting for people to come to you. More than likely, they won’t. You need to hustle.
People help you build your idea or not
I was devastated. I wasn’t going to work on my idea that weekend. Maybe not ever.
Maybe not ever? That right there is a leading indicator to the conviction of the need, importance and desire to build this idea. It’s an alarm bell.
I had to pick another team within 10 minutes or else you don’t have a team. Let me tell you, you don’t want to be the guy grabbing the mic and begging for a team to take you because you don’t a have one yet.
Mike didn’t have 10 minutes. He had all night. He knew early on that he was not succeeding in making a team. A good facilitator would have spotted that this strugge and suggested making contingency plans. Regardless of which - welcome to life. Sometimes it is hard, and sometimes things happen at the last minute. Get used to it if you want to be an entrepreneur, or build a startup.
You just gave up your 1 million dollar idea.
At an point in life, if you give up, that’s your choice, accept the responsibility for your own decisions and (in)actions.
At least I was not alone, 20 more participants had to pick another team.
In a room of 100-150 people, where 50% of the attendees are pitching an idea, and the ideal team size is 6 people, it is statistically impossible for all people to work on their own project.
I’m going to let you into a secret - I believe that some people get a better Startup Weekend experience when they work on an idea that is not their own.
That experience was for me one of the worst things while participating in StartupWeekend.
And at the same time, probably one of the best - even if Mike isn’t in a position to appreciate that yet.
Do some pre-dating
Looking back now I see that my idea wasn’t that stupid and that it could be a success after all. Look at all the different one-stop book publishing platform shooting from the ground at the moment. 7write and Tablo are one of them.
Nobody said that an idea not chosen at Startup Weekend is stupid. There are a whole heap of reasons your idea won’t get chosen regardless of how very brilliant it might actually be.
Ironically, as far as I’m aware, Mike didn’t pursue his idea after the weekend he pitched it at and still hasn’t - yet still has some frustration.
If he was that convinced about his idea, he would have made it happen.
StartupWeekend should be helping everyone getting to know each other beforehand. Build a platform where you can meet the StartupWeekend people before the event.
In my experience, some cities sell 50% of their tickets in the week before the event, which makes this nigh on impossible.
On the other hand, the cities I have worked with who have held pre-event networking sessions, have received a poor turn out to those sessions. People have limited time, and, unfortunately the point Mike makes here is with hindsight. It’s catch 22 for the organisers.
With StartupWeekend NEXT they provide a curriculum where you can learn the methods, the knowledge. Not the people you are going to work with at StartupWeekend that you are attending.
StartupWeekend isn’t about building new companies at all
That’s right, it isn’t. We admit it freely. As a facilitator, I tell this to the audience at every event I facilitate.
Let me be clear. I still had a great weekend. I met so many great people there. Paul (who founded Pitch.rs) is one of them. The team I eventually end up joining was awesome. They taught me so many things. Like the fact that entrepreneurism isn’t something for everyone. Two people left our team after 24 hours because they pictured StartupWeekend totally different. The rest of the team had an awesome time and we still have contact with each other. It was 54 hours of fun, craziness, insomnia and personal exploration. That is what StartupWeekend is for me (and so many others I talked with).
Here Mike describes perfectly what Startup Weekend is! To save you scrolling up here’s a reminder:
Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.
Did he share? Yes. Form/join a team? Yes. Did we inspire? Yes. Educate? Yes. Empower? Probably. Launch a startup? Not from the team he was on, no.
Is Mike still doing stuff, with people he met at that event, two years later? I believe he is yes.
Success story? You bet it is.
Expand your network and learn new things along the way for building solid (new) companies or improving current ones. I preach to everybody to participate in an event like StartupWeekend once in their life. If you are an entrepreneur but especially if you work at a big corporate. You will come back a changed man or women for sure. StartupWeekend cultivates a lot of energy and resources in a weekend but doesn’t capitalise on it.
The clue is in the name: Startup Weekend.
This is a flaw in the StartupWeekend ecosystem in my experience and they should come up with something that tackles that.
Until recently Startup Weekend had chosen, very deliberately, not to venture into the time space of “after the weekend”. As mentioned Startup Weekend NEXT is an experiement to see what value can be delivered after the weekend, without straying too far from the vision.
Having a company after 54 hours is bullshit!
Yes it is indeed bullshit, but sometimes it isn’t. Either way, it’s still not the primary goal.
If I suggested to you, that I’d put you in a room of male and female strangers for a weekend, and on Monday morning, you must marry one, or some, of them, you’d call me an idiot (at best).
Startup Weekend does not suggest that every, or indeed any, team formed at Startup Weekend should “marry” each other - but sometimes, the stars align in just the right way to make it possible.
When it happens, it’s a great side effect of what is actually intended.
StartupWeekend is not the only competition where you will learn to build a company in a limited set of hours. StartupBus is one of them as well. Conceive and launch a startup in 72 hours on a bus full of strangers somewhere in Europe or America (and Africa for the first time later this year). I participated in 2 editions of StartupBus Europe so far. But as well as StartupWeekend, in the end extending your network and putting more data inside your brain are the key drivers for me too attend these kind of events.
Incubators and accelerators are more the world domination kind of programs in my opinion where you actually build a viable startup with growth potential to get revenue in and be sustainable as fast as possible.
As far as I’m aware, there is no global, empirical data which suggest that incubators and accelerators are actually making the world a better place. There are certainly some notable successes - but for each one there are hundred, possibly thousands, of products/teams/companies that do not succeed. We rarely hear about them.It is also arguable that the teams which succeed in the biggest way, may well have done so without the aid of an accelerator. I welcome anyone who has data to add to this sub-conversation to please share it.
StartupWeekend promises you that you will launch a startup in 54 hours.
Startup Weekend makes no such promise.
It all depends how you define a startup if this is true. “A startup is any firm that’s younger than one year.”, according to the Kaufmann Foundation, the people behind StartupWeekend. A firm, after 54 hours you don’t have a firm, so no startup. Funny that Kaufmann defines a startup that way looking at their StartupWeekend endeavours. You have an idea and maybe a MVP if you are lucky and got the right team. Not a firm.
Steve Blank, the guy that pursues “Lean Startup” has his own definition of a startup. “A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable business model.” Thats something that some of the teams can come up with in 54 hours. A business model. So when you look at the definition of Steve Blank you can say that it is possible to have a startup after 54 hours.
These two statements are fact:
- A Startup Weekend event is approximately 54 hours long.
- Startups (of all definitions) get launched because of Startup Weekend.
They do not necessarily need to be tied to each other to be determined a success.
As a point of order, Startup Weekend is a registered 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. The Kaufmann Foundation is a global sponsor.
The after sales of StartupWeekend is terrible!
That rather depends on what you think the after sales should be, and what you think Startup Weekend is selling.
Let me be clear. Keeping that startup after 54 hours is the hardest part. I experienced winning StartupWeekend, loosing StartupWeekend,
There are no losers at Startup Weekend.
winning StartupBus and loosing StartupBus in that order. What I do know for sure is that after those amazing 54 hours most of the people will go back to what they know before that weekend or bus trip. The StartupWeekend ecosystem is more than the 54 hours you have in that weekend. Look at some StartupWeekend Amsterdam winners, Goddessalert in 2011 and EasyGiving in 2012. What did come out of those? Nothing much.
Any lack of activity after the weekend is not the fault of Startup Weekend.
As a winner of a Startup Weekend, I can personally vouch that winning Startup Weekend is mostly meaningless - unless you make it otherwise.
There are many valid reasons why a winning team does not move forwards with the idea that they worked on.
Companies I do hear about that arose from the Dutch StartupWeekend are Toogethr, Owlin, SNTMNT and Party With A Local. All companies are not first prize winners. SNTMNT got into the Tech All Stars program and Owlin into Rockstart.
Personally, I’m not sure that “Getting into an accelerator” is any measure of success. Getting revenue, preferably greater than expenses incurred, is a real measure of success.
However, if you’re suggesting that these companies did better because of their Startup Weekend attendance (all three mentioned were formed at Startup Weekend Amsterdam 2011), then that’s a good thing.
StartupWeekend should facilitate more on the after sales of participating in a StartupWeekend and make sure that it uses the power of the network to get these startups their next step.
Startup Weekend. As an alumni (person, or team) you are free to use the network however you wish. Startup Weekend is not here to run your startup for you.
I wonder what the numbers are of the amount of ‘startups’ that pursue their idea after StartupWeekend. If anyone knows, please share.
There are indeed numbers around this subject. I’m not up to date, so ask Franck Nouyrigat to comment.
What is next for StartupWeekend if the current form is dead?
The current form isn’t dead, and your own words prove it.
I am glad initiatives like StartupWeekend are around. They help me and a lot of others be better than we thought we could be.
That’s great news.
But in its current form they are loosing interest from a big group of (regular) people.
I’ve said this privately, but now I’ll say it publically - (except for those that come along for the fun factor only) serious serial Startup Weekenders worry me.
How much contact do you have with your Kindergarten teacher? Primary school teacher? University lecturers?
Mike - perhaps it’s worth considering that, for you, Startup Weekend has accomplished what it set out to achieve, and perhaps it’s time for you to move on to making the world a better place.
Hopefully things change over time so these initiatives get even better!
and here’s the crux of the matter. “Hopefully”.
Mike - if you want Startup Weekend to change, the first thing you should do is step to the other side of the table. Come and become an organiser, and with apologies to Gandhi, be the change you want to see.
I am looking forward to visiting StartupWeekend Amsterdam next week. Will I be seeing you there? What are your own experiences with StartupWeekend?
I’ll see you there.
Follow me on Twitter for more insights: @clogish
