Startup Weekend – A great idea

A new (and great) idea has been making its way across the country.  It’s called Startup Weekend.  What is it?  From their site:

Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?

Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model. 

Occurring in cities across the world, Startup Weekend is the new way to allow your local entrepreneurial community to come together and incubate a company from concept to completion in just 54 hours. – Source: StartupWeekend.com

Still don’t understand?  Get a bunch of smart people with entrepreneurial spirits, ideas from their brains and those provided by community members, put them in teams, and make the ideas come to life.  Phoenix was recently selected as one of the cities to host one of these weekends.  This isn’t a user group.  So if you think you can show up and sit in the back of the room, my guess is you can’t.  Roll up your sleeves and get ready to collaborate.

You literally take an idea, bring it to a vision, and in some cases get to an implemented 1st cut of a product.  Your team builds a company in a weekend.

Several local sponsors in Phoenix (and other cities where these are happening) have come together to provide the facilities, food, and other forms of sponsorship so the weekend can be successful.  Want more information?  Here’s some links for you:

• Startup Weekend main site
• Phoenix Startup Weekend
• Phoenix Idea Gathering
• Phoenix Planning Wiki

Still need some convincing?  Local entrepreneur Sean Tierney wrote some of his thoughts when he went to a Startup Weekend in San Francisco:

Let me just say that in every respect this was an amazing event. It condensed a year long product dev and launch cycle into just 2.5 days and it began on a Friday night with a room full of 132 complete strangers. The fact they were able to keep the wheels on the bus and deliver a working alpha by midnight on Sunday was an impressive feat in itself, but what was even more impressive was to see how leaders emerged and groups solved problems."

I’m looking forward to seeing how this event evolves and being a part of it.  It isn’t a free event (but isn’t expensive), but hopefully that will give you more incentive to be serious about it.  It will be a great event for learning, leading, networking and being creative.