Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Every American is born with the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” Contrary to popular belief, however, PURSUIT is the operative word, NOT HAPPINESS.

Nevertheless, conventional wisdom is that that we are all entitled to achieve the American dream, upon demand. After all, “a dollar and a dream” is all it takes to reap lottery millions.

In the Web 2.0 start-up world, all it takes is “two weeks and $700 bucks” for cool app glory, as Digg’s Kevin Rose can attest to:

I was sitting around thinking about how this would play out. My background in school is in computer science. I wrote a scoping document to a friend, who is a developer. The friend said it would take two or three weeks to create and cost 700 bucks, so I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’

Two or three whole weeks? How old school! The folks behind the TechStars startup on a shoestring incubator believe there is no need to wait so long to get a startup up: “Startup Weekend, Let’s create a startup!” 

What happens when 70 cool techies huddle in Boulder, Colorado to “create something beautiful over one jam packed weekend”? Cool ideas get bantered around, a lot, becasue “the geeks shall inherit the earth.”

What does TechStars do? “We help startups start.” Not exactly a long view on entrepreneurial value creation.

What does it take to “create a startup in a weekend”? Seven functions are apparently crucial:

Developer
PR
Whatever, I make it happen
User Experience
Designer
Legal
Cook

Surprisingly, Yoga Instructor did not make the list, even though yoga is part of the Startup Weekend agenda.

Truth be told, Startup Weekend actually required more than a weekend; Brainstorming for startup ideas took place online prior to the on-site intensive.

Did Startup Weekend participants take advantage of pre-planning time to do in-depth plans for the “next big thing”?

Market research perhaps? Census data review? Focus groups? NO indication of any such solid business planning development tools deployed.

From where did participants draw their startup inspirations then? From themselves, and their four year olds.

The first startup idea posted prior to the weekend, by David Duey, who hopes to help his infant browse better:

Googlodeon : My four year old son plays online kiddie games and he loves to browse the various toy sites. There’s only one problem, he can’t read or spell. There must be a good way to search without requiring people to be able to read and write.

Nick Woodward hates “having to pay the service charge to Ticketmaster” and wants to enable “stakeholders to possibly bypass the promotions company and/or the ticketing company.”

Tyler has “just graduated college” and knows “the pain of purchasing textbooks.” His “value creation” startup proposal:

Why not build a site where students can list the classes they took, with what teachers, and rate whether or not you should buy the book (buy/don’t buy). Users would also enter their schedule for the following semester and then get the privilege of students knowledge that have already taken the classes. Now instead of buying 5 textbooks for $500 and only using 3 I will just buy three for $300. The site is linked to Amazon to receive affiliate fees from students purchasing their textbooks from the site. The student saves $200 and the site collects $30 in affiliate fees. Now that is value creation! The problem of high priced college textbooks has been targeted for years with online book swaps, but never has anyone taken on the problem from this angle.

Joe Scharf weighed in with the WINNING formula for a SERVICE that TARGETS STARTUP WEEKEND ITSELF!

The Idea: Vevo.com as in Vote Early, Vote Often.

Whereas twitter asks “what are you doing” in 140 chars or less, VEVO asks “what are you deciding?”

The idea came from thinking about the Startup Weekend model. To eliminate the need for countless number of rules and to keep the Startup Weekend model self-organizing, we will need to rely on a democratic voting process to guide the course of the group’s action. I imagine we’ll be making a lot of decisions during the weekend through group votes. We will want a method to make these decisions quickly so we can focus more on developing and less on decision “overhead”

VEVO facilitates this process by allowing decisions to be made by a group through a quick, efficient, and accurate democratic voting process.

TechCrunch commenters on the not so winning innovation:

John: “I smell a digg clone with a facebook app”

Don Wilson: “70 people to make a polling system. Wow. What a waste of talent.”

Mike Trotzke: “wow, I designed a tool like this on a plane ride to Cali a few weeks ago. Same idea, but I have’nt had time to finish it up. I even picked up ‘DecideAlready.com’ to publish it to.”

anonymous: “check out top20network.com, they have a similar tool, but gotta have a .edu email address from a top 20 school to get in, surely someone from those 70 people do, right?”

dag: This is silly, and has a whiff of San Jose, circa 1999. Hey, I know! Why don’t we sell pets online? You can FedEx a labradoodle, right?

Startup Weekend’s startup monetization strategy is short on innovation as well. “How to make money,” according to Scharf:

1. See twitter.com
2. 37signals model of varying service levels based on # of groups that a moderator can form, # of decisions per month, security, archiving of vote outcomes, notarization of votes
3. Advertising (last resort)
4. Maybe Diebold will be interested in acquiring us

TechStars ought to have had a required StartUp Weekend reading list.

My top pick: “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” by Joseph Schumpeter, discussing radical innovation and creative destruction to spur entrepreneurial competition which:

Commands a decisive cost or qualiy advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.

OR, the type of meaningful entrepreneurial competition that requires a tad more effort than a cool, yoga-pizza-beer infused techie bonding weekend in the Colorado foothhills.

ALSO: Facebook Generation: Entrepreneurs or Hackers? and Google Buys Postini PLUS 500 million Email Secrets

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN