MadMode: Startup Weekend KC: a few great ideas and a ton of great people

Startup Weekend KC: a few great ideas and a ton of great people

When I first heard about Startup Weekend Kansas City, I hesitated to buy a ticket. Boy am I glad I eventually did. All that for $40? Wow.

The event started with dinner Friday evening at 6pm, and at 7pm, the floor was open for pitches. Oops! If only I had blocked out a little time to prepare, my weekend might have been radically different. On the fly, I pitched my ideas on modern media literacy as an artisan's guild for free culture and free software, but that's a .org idea and the theme here was very .com. So when the 40+ ideas were pruned down to the 8 avalable workspaces, mine didn't make the cut.

I made a t-shirt design to commemorate the event:

I played a minor role in the Covalent Bonding team; "Connecting Researchers to Accelerate Science" is something I have a lot of experience with, though a project can only have so many cooks. I offered to beta-test the android G1 version of Activism2Go; we didn't manage to get that done yet, but I'm still hoping.

The pitch for Startup Weekend that convinced me to buy a ticket still rings true:

Most ventures fail on Monday morning, which isn’t the point. The point is, you learn new skills, processes, coding frameworks, legal jargon, business practices, spread sheet programs, etc that you can bring back to your current venture. Startup Weekend is a weekend warrior event where anything goes, and practice is implied. You’re not judged (unless you judge) and learning is paramount.

People who attend the weekend stay in touch, hire each other and form new ventures as a result of ‘colliding’ for 54 hours. Its an awesome three days of networking, team building, coding, business planning and pitching (with some added cocktails and food).

This event, along with CCCKC, startpath, and METS, made my wish for more local collaboration come true: In addition to @danmelton, @whereisciao, and @webdevgeek, I made contacts with nimblelogic and electrotank, to name a few. Do keep in touch, all you #kcsw folks!