Bloomington Startup Weekend

Startup Weekends begin and end with a group decision, roughly following this overgeneralized schedule:

Friday—pitch ideas, select one, and figure out who is doing what.

Saturday—build things

Sunday—launch things, and discuss what to do next

In between, we eat, drink and mingle.

That final decision involves the future of the company everyone worked so hard to get off the ground. There are five options put to the large group:

1. Do Nothing. Shake hands, exchange business cards, and call it a weekend.
2. Sell it on eBay. Highest bidder wins, and everyone gets their share.
3. Keep Working. Dedicate more time, on evenings and weekends, to continue to work, mostly to delay the decision about who takes over.
4. Give control to a Few. Select a small group of founders to devote 10-20 hours weekly to taking the next step.
5. Give control to One. Name a CEO and wish her the best.

As long as everyone agrees to move forward, one timely possibility might be submitting the idea to startup incubators TechStars and Y Combinator. The application deadlines for these to organizations fall about 6-7 weeks after the new Bloomington company is launched. Both demand relocation of a small group of founders (to Boulder or Boston, respectively), but there is some seed money being dangled to help develop the company. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to fill out the forms and see what happens.