Boulder Startup Weekend 2

During the first Boulder Startup Weekend, I had come up early to help Andrew, a kid I had never met, setup and run the weekend. As I walked in around 6pm, he was filling a tub with beer and ice. This worried me. Here was a 24 year old kid, who had put together this event that I hoped introduced me to the Boulder tech scene, and he was filling a tub with beer and ice. I asked him about the plan for evening. “We’ll probably work until 8-9pm, and then head out to the bars.” he told me.

“Great,” I thought, “this is going to be a royal waste of time. I will kill Danny Newman (he spent the previous two weeks convincing me to attend.)

I realized that we had no name tags, so I drove to Target and bought some name tags and some pens, I got back about 7:20 or so, and Andrew greeted me with, “Sorry dude, we have already selected the top 3 ideas to review.” By 8pm, a idea was selected, and at 11:30pm, Andrew started to kick people out.

During the initial three hours, various groups formed, disbanded, reconstituted differently, and sort of settled into: Development, UX, Creative, BizDev, Marketing/PR and Legal. I found a few like-minded folks, and we became the bizdev group. As 11:30pm - midnight rolled around, I started the 40 minute drive home excited about what was happening. I got home around 1am, and worked through several ideas until 4am, when I came up with what I thought was a positive monetization strategy. And at 7am I drove back to Boulder, stopping for bagels on the way, and dove back into the weekend.

What took me a year to realize is that Andrew, for all his effort was not the reason I spent all that time focused on solving a problem. Part of it was my style (ADD plus insomnia helps), but most of it was the other people in the room that I was excited to work this problem through with. It was the people.

As Boulder 2 rolled around, I was afraid that we would see the same people, and the growth we had all experienced over the previous year would make Boulder 2 flop. I promised to just live blog the event. (For those that care, having won and lost the Cohen Cup, I am not blogging for quantity, but rather quality*) I had to coach lacrosse for a couple of hours, so I showed up about an hour and a half late.

The room was buzzing.

There were a lot of new faces, and while people were eating pizza, they were talking about a bunch of different ideas. Every white board I saw had writing on it, and I heard several people proclaim “I need dry erase markers! An idea has hit me!”

The energy was palpable.

You could literally watch people become energized. Discussions heated up, laughter soon followed. Groups formed around open tables, ideas soon flowed.

And then it hit me. It was the people. Andrew loves to talk about how Startup Weekend is about the community. I love to make fun of him for that, but the group of people that had decided to come and do Startup Weekend were quickly forming into just that. A community.

And as 11pm hit, and Andrew started kicking people out, people were slow to leave.

I wonder who  at home right now thinking about a problem discussed tonight, and coming up with interesting solutions?

* Given my status as the #1 Douche Bag in the World, I figured for those that want to be funny, here are some tweets you can cut and paste:

“@micah, great goal to go after quality. I suppose better late than never!”

“@micah you are a douche bag. What kinda idiot goes home and works on monetization strategies?”

“@micah great post, you are awesome. I so wish I was just like you.”