Phoenix Startup Weekend

This weekend the Phoenix Startup Weekend got underway, and at least for me it has been somewhat of a whirlwind. First, let me say what a GREAT JOB Gregg Drennan, Justin Crossman, Derek Neighbors, Sean Tierney, Steven Shaffer, Brian Shaler, the folks from Gangplank, and all of the others have done with this event. I was blown away by the level of commitment and organization that they brought to this event.

Last night there were many great ideas and some not-so-great ideas present, but in the end it was eventually whittled down to the following seven ideas.

• Doggie Slobber – Matches you with compatible dogs
• Twitter Rater – Tells you if a keyword is viewed positively or negatively
• Data / IP Escrow – Holds your code ’til you get paid
• GPS Inventory – Realtime tracking of trucks and what they have in them
• SaaS Backup – A way to pull all your data from hosted services (Flickr, Basecamp)
• Alt Reality Game – You play it… it plays back
• Diet Management tool

Personally, I proposed the Alternative Reality Game (ala “Majestic” and “The Game“). However, my spin on this genre of game is that instead of building the actual game you build a platform that could be used to allow others to develop a game of this kind on their own for others to play. Additionally, we would take advantage of the the modern mediums available to us, specifically social media to maximize the game players’ entrenchment in the game. We attracted a significant number of people to our project and ultimately became a team.

If I were going to provide some feedback for the next Startup Weekend, whether it was held in Phoenix or elsewhere, it would be to provide a little more guidance to the teams. For example, each team should be provided goals for the weekend, have to have the minimum and maximum amounts of certain positions, such as programmers and project managers. For example since our team was fairly large we ended up being about 50% programmers and 48% project managers, with not knowing what we were expected to produce, other than “a prototype marketable product”, we have run into some problems. Our programmers were experienced in different programming languages and methodologies, which has lead to some problems. The project managers, myself included, all had differing opinions or visions for what we were going to accomplish in the weekend and ultimately where the product should go and how it should function. I think that both of these issues could have been overcome if we would not have had so many developers or project managers, or had a better idea of the scope of what was expected. I suppose that this could also be attributed to the fact that our idea was not the traditional website based product that other teams were building.

The other idea that seems to alienate Network Admin-type people, is the fact that for the most part there is very little in the way of provisioning of infrastructure. With the JumpBox’s in place there was very little to do to provision the back end tech, which is a testament to their technology, but it left some folks that were not Developers, project managers, or designers in the lurch, unsure what they were doing with their 52 hours over the course of the weekend.

Regardless of what (or if any at all) of the ideas become a real-life startup company the experience has been a good one. While I would argue that the weekend is not 100% like the experience of being involved in a true startup because of the fact that you do not get to choose your resources & people, but must proceed with what is on hand, and those that stick around for the whole weekend. In a real startup you would have more ability to choose who you are working with and platforms you were working with, rather than being at the mercy of what people know, and what they are comfortable with.