Not sure exactly how many projects made it through the final cut last night. I think eight, will get an update later. All I do know is that at least two, and maybe three are no longer functioning. Including mine.
Seems like one or two of the team members were not really committed to the StopWhere concept. Why they voted for it is beyond me. Thought the iPhone platform was niche. Pitched their own concept. Wanted us to all go home and think about and decide this morning. Called a vote at midnight. StopWhere won. But the Cocoa dev was no longer committed. Boom! Going to dress in “Don’t Pitch Me Bro” VC Wear today.
At least 20 people no longer have a company to work on. A bunch of them are taking their balls and going home today. Unfortunately I brought the court.
Lesson of the night, make sure your team members are committed.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Turnkey/Jumbis // Nov 8, 2008 at 1:34 pm
If you’re one of those guys headed home, we want you to help us work on JUMBIS, the turnkey single product sales website! Come down to room 226 for details!
2 Blake Perdue // Nov 8, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Lance, we need smart biz guys to help us figure out our business model and determine what features and ideas to include on launch. Come help us — maybe you don’t have to join, but you can advise
3 Tyler // Nov 8, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I think that one of the Startup Weekend projects should be to create a system to help take care of all the stuff we did the first night. Allow people to create profiles with skills, interests, etc. Allow people to submit & vote on and eliminate ideas (we did that with the idea share, but I think Startup Weekend has some specific needs that could be met by a proprietary system.) Being able to submit video pitches would be nice.
That way tentative groups could be formed before arriving, which may reduce some of the bailout / concept disagreement?
Thoughts?
4 Dean // Nov 9, 2008 at 12:20 am
These folks missed out on the biggest benefit of ASW — building a product in a weekend. Unfortunately, they prevented almost 2 dozen people from this experience, as well. I’m disappointed in them for not acting like professionals.
Three Lessons I Learned From This Exercise:
1- don’t let brainstorming devolve into project creep
2- keep brainstorming focused on current product
3- and yes… make sure brainstorming is done by committed team members (Jack Welch has great advice about low performers who don’t buy into the culture - http://tinyurl.com/5ts8r2)
5 Why Atlanta Startup Weekend Rocked / (Sanjay_Parekh) == (Rambling) // Nov 14, 2008 at 8:42 pm
[...] concurrently. I’m not sure how many actually had full teams after the voting on Friday but very quickly a handful of the teams imploded. Various reasons for this but others who were directly involved are in a better position to [...]