Bloomington Startup Weekend

The following is a summary of the positive aspects of Bloomington Startup Weekend compiled from a discussion between founders on the final day as we worked toward a private launch.

Strengths:

• Intellectual horsepower—There was universal amazement over how much could be accomplished by putting a bunch of people in a great space with a common task. Visitors were astounded with how much was accomplished in a short time. Bloomington is a great place for this kind of collaboration, and we want to know how often we can do this and keep up the energy.
• Open structure—The lack of a prescribed system was both blessing and a curse. Many loved the ability to choose our own teams and float from group to group, as desired or needed. The managed chaos enabled us to be creative and learn by failing.
• A great learning experience—This weekend was a wonderful opportunity to try new things, learn new skills, and understand how all of the pistons in a startup engine fire to make a new company go.
• Surprisingly little conflict—Potentially big egos were held in check, and the different skill sets communicated well enough to accomplish something. While there were heated debates that led to frustration, the self-organization worked itself out either through exits (a few chose to leave) or re-configuration (some chose to focus on other things).
• The “Accelerator”—Juan Carlos coined a great term for this framework: accelerator. It isn’t an incubator, because the speed is so much faster. The power of the group could work equally well for both brand new businesses and existing ones, willing to spend some equity for a boost.
• City Hall—More than one City employee commented about how alive the City Hall facility was with 100 people roaming the first floor in constant collaboration. The chamber space was wonderful for this event, as was being able to give development a separate room with higher bandwidth. It will be difficult to picture another Bloomington Startup Weekend happening anywhere else but the Showers complex.
• Networking—It was great to hang out with like-minded people who either already get what you are talking about or are motivated to understand.
• Diversity—Many different skills, locations and experiences were represented, including a noticeable number of women and a few international students. The slower pace to fill the available founder spots probably helped include more kinds of people.
• Success can be repeated—The things that worked well are probably repeatable. Find out what made the development group so good, for example, and do it again.
• The vision was realized—Organizers had plenty of nightmares about how wrong this event could go (lack of attendance, lots of fighting, boring project), but in the end everything came out better than expected. In some areas, our group knocked the ball out of the park.
• We found the Midwest Tech Community—The only people who thought of Indiana as a place for frontline technology are the locals working in technology. Even those folks could only see the part of that larger community that was working in their respective offices. The number of people interested as early as the second day in doing this again is proof the startup weekend framework is a great tool for building awareness.
• Exchange of ideas—There were many great company pitches (albeit, a bit unpolished) on Friday night, and a tremendous amount of knowledge shared between founders throughout the weekend. We probably went from about 30 Twitter users to 60 just by exposing people to that new social network. There are at least two spin-off projects in the works that have nothing to do with the company we are creating.
• Leaders emerge—People were willing to take on responsibility and do the things that needed to be done, even if it meant sacrificing some of their personal goals headed into Friday.

I invite all of our participants, including those who couldn’t stay for all three days, to comment on this list and any other positives you drew from your experience.