Andrew Hyde was sitting in my office at Techstars the other night and just threw it out there. What if we got a bunch of crazy hackers, marketing types, user experience people, and business geniuses in one room for an entire weekend? Could we start work on Friday, and launch a “real” live startup by Sunday night with no budget beyond good will and human capital?
Well, we’re going to find out.
A while back at a BarCamp, one team of about 8 hackers planned and launched a spoof called KnifeRobot in about 4 hours, complete with user accounts, e-commerce, marketing, and a blog. So the thought popped into Andrew’s head – why couldn’t we do something real nearly that fast?
StartupWeekend is July 6-8 in Boulder. Go sign up if you can plan to spend the whole weekend working on a startup. We’re taking suggestions for “ideas” (at StartupWeekend.com, not here) and we’ll bring the top 3 to the kickoff on Friday night, and pick one as a group. Everyone who participates “fully” will earn an equal share of founders stock in this new venture. The whole process will be zero-friction, with quick democratic votes deciding on any decisions as necessary.
And the startup will go live on that Sunday night by 11:59pm.
The thought is that perhaps it will be interesting enough that somebody will want to run it as an ongoing concern, and the founders can vote to give a (presumably big) chunk of equity to whoever that will be.
Please only sign up for StartupWeekend if you plan to come for the entire weekend and add real value by planning, coding, thinking, designing, blogging, living, and breathing this thing for about 55 straight hours.
