A better way to do startup weekends

The TechWeek conference that I wrote about earlier this week included a startup weekend event. At a startup weekend, a group of aspiring entrepreneurs propose ideas to turn into businesses over a weekend (typically, 50 hours). The first step is to whittle the list of ideas down to 10 or so, and then the participants whose ideas weren't chosen join the teams whose ideas will be pursued. For the remaining time, the teams flesh out the ideas, talk to customers and write code. At the end of the weekend, the teams present their startups to a group of judges (typically, angel investors, venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs).

Startup weekends have a lot of problems, but the biggest one is that they turn startup creation into a game played over two days that can be won. That's not how startups work, and startup weekends trivialize the process while focusing on things that the team members already know how to do.

I sat in on the presentations at TechWeek's startup weekend. The demonstrations of working code were very basic, when there was any working code at all, and by and large, the "customer interviews" turned out to be nothing more than a collection of market size statistics gathered through Google. Jason Cohen, in his "A Smart Bear" blog, wrote some advice for startup weekend participants, and he pointed out that the goal should be figuring out whether or not you've identified a viable business opportunity, not demonstrating your ability to code:

You and I know you can code an app and produce a simple clean home page. Everyone here can. So the quality or quantity of that creation will not be why your company succeeds.

Cohen makes some excellent suggestions about what startup weekend participants should try to accomplish, but his key recommendation is to get out of your comfort zone. Developers are excellent at writing code, but they tend not to be as comfortable with talking to customers or identifying business models.

With that in mind, here are two suggestions for alternate startup weekends that could be more valuable in the long run for their participants:

• Customer Development Weekend: As with current startup weekends, participants propose product and service ideas and whittle them down to 10 or so. Each team then figures out how to present its concept, writes a questionnaire and starts interviewing potential customers. The team must interview at least five potential customers face-to-face. It then takes the customer feedback from the interviews and uses it to either modify the original concept, or discard it in favor of a new concept, which then has to be retested. Once the concept is solidified, the team considers and selects one or more business models, and develops arguments for why the model (or models) will work. Finally, the teams present their concepts, along with the interview research to substantiate them, and their business models.
• Building Strengths Weekend: It starts with the same process of coming up with a list of 10 or so product and service ideas, but then the team members work on the areas where they need the most help. The developers are responsible for getting out and talking with customers. The businesspeople with no programming experience learn how to program enough to build a skeleton of the concept. Everyone learns by doing. The final presentations show what the teams accomplished, and what they need to work on in the future.

The goal of starup weekends should be to learn what you don't know, rather than do the same thing on the weekend that you do during the week. If the objective is learning rather than winning a prize, the competitive aspect does more harm than good.

TechWeek: A big step forward for Chicago's startup community

TechWeek, a week-long group of conferences, meetups and social events for the Midwestern startup community, is going on in Chicago. midVentures, a consulting firm and conference organizer based in Chicago and San Francisco, organized TechWeek. The actual TechWeek Conference began last Friday and ends tonight, but additional partner events will take place through Thursday, July 28th.

The first-day crowd was far beyond midVentures' expectations--more than 1,500 paid attendees, with five times as many people registering at the door as the organizers expected. The demand was so great that they ran out of badges on Friday and had to rush to print more in time for Saturday morning. The event was held at Chicago's landmark Merchandise Mart, the biggest building in the world when it opened in 1930, and still a very impressive structure. The Merchandise Mart has its own El (elevated train) station, food court and retail shops, as well as the hundreds of private merchandise showrooms for which it's known. It also has three floors of meeting and event space, and TechWeek took over one of the three floors.

The speakers that midVentures lined up were first-rate, and in the sessions I attended, there were very few sales pitches--the emphasis was on practical knowledge for developers and businesspeople. Here's a list of some of the better-known speakers:

• Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technical Officer of the United States
• Jason Fried, Co-Founder and President, 37Signals
• Gian Fulgoni, CEO, Comscore
• Jeff Lawson, Co-Founder & CEO, Twilio
• Dave McClure, Founding Partner, 500Startups
• Craig Newmark, Founder, Craigslist.org
• Dominique Raccah, CEO/Publisher, Sourcebooks
• Hiten Shaw, Founder and CEO, KISSmetrics

There were a number of local investors making keynote speeches and on panels; perhaps the best-known, at least locally, was J.B. Pritzker, Managing Partner of the Pritzker Group, founder of New World Ventures and a member of the family that owns Hyatt Hotels and TransUnion.  However, with the exception of Dave McClure, there wasn't much participation from the Silicon Valley angel and VC community, nor was there much interest from the New York or Boston investment communities. That has to change in a big way for Chicago to become a first-tier startup community.

One of the things that I noticed in the sessions I attended was that there were far more businesspeople than developers at the event, and most of the businesspeople had little or no idea how to find technical talent or a technical co-founder. An event to help match business and technical co-founders would have made a lot of sense, but it didn't make it onto this year's schedule.

There was clearly enough interest in this year's event to make a 2012 version a certainty, and there are a few things that I'd suggest to the organizers for next year:

• The Merchandise Mart is a great location, but the sight lines in the two largest meeting spaces were awful. The stages were blocked by pillars from many places in the rooms. It would be better to have the presentations in better spaces within the Merchandise Mart, or if that's not possible, in conventional hotel conference rooms.
• Rather than scheduling the midVenturesLAUNCH event in parallel with the final day of the TechWeek Conference, LAUNCH should be held on its own day, with no other events going on. The TechWeek events that I watched on Monday via streaming video were very poorly attended, due to LAUNCH going on at the same time.
• There needs to be more presence from Silicon Valley, New York and Boston investors.

TechWeek was a very encouraging event for Chicago- and Midwest-based entrepreneurs, and I hope that it's a sign of much more to come.