At a minimum, I am amazed, awed and inspired by what happened this weekend. I had the opportunity to participate in a group experience in creating a functional site within a 54 hour period. Looking back on it now, I don’t think I have worked this hard in years and I forgot how rewarding and exhausting it can be.

This is a good round up by Andrew Hyde, who is the organizer of StartupWeekend. He is right on when he says the dynamics “creat(ed) a very tense and awkward meeting for Friday night.” To show how tumultuous it was, 125 people that started out on Friday night, we finished Sunday at 9pm with ~60 or so.

I won’t rehash what was said in many other places; An Bui, Michael Rice, and Anthony Stevens. What I will add is that the chaos that we experienced the first night was very invigorating. It allowed us to bust through a lot of pre-conceived notions; must be heavily reliant on process over people, expectations for the goal of the weekend from pure community building to building a functional company. By Saturday morning we had divvied up roles and responsibilities, defined the general product / market understanding and got to work.

Don’t get me wrong, process is very important. My point is that an organization can be too reliant on process and as such, may limit people from trying something new and allowing them to sink or swim. I was blown away by the way people stepped up to the plate when deliverables came due or when they identified a problem.

My role transitioned on Friday night from a casual observer (planning to live blog) to simply ensuring that the Marketing team had the resources, feedback, and coordination to create a complete Messaging Plan and web site! I won’t list the team members by name, but they were all key in getting the job done and it was my immense pleasure having the opportunity to work with them.

Key takeaways from StrartupWeekend and the launch of skillbitTM:

1. Chaos is good (let the process self organize)
2. Once the goals and objectives are identified - determine and assign roles and responsibilities immediately
3. Feedback loops are key
   1. As concepts transition to reality, ensure that everyone is on board with how they evolve from marketing / bizdev to UX, from UX to design and from UX / design to dev and from dev to launch!
4. Stay the hell out of the way of people who are in the Zone!
   1. Keep them hydrated, caffeinated, and fed
   2. Simply make their life as easy as possible
5. Repeat - after you have caught up on your sleep

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.