Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

What’s the best way to Web 2.0 start-up glory these days? Build a Facebook App, of course!

What’s the fastest route to Web 2.0 PR hype? Throw a startup weekend party, and hope the world cheers along.

BUT, what happens when the startup doesn’t start as promised at the end of the promised weekend? Who needs a startup after all!

Such is the legacy of last weekend’s publicly overhyped, three day, pizza-beer-yoga infused techie bonding festival in the Colorado foothills. “Buzz crap,” in the words of one now jaded participant.

While almost seventy “entrepreneurs” were touting themselves as being gathered in Boulder to “create something beautiful over one jam packed weekend,” I observed: Startup Weekend Fever: Creative Destruction NOT On Agenda.

Neither was a business plan. Ditto apparently for any meaningful post startup weekend plan of action to actually operate the would be startup.

Why not? Spending a hacking weekend together appears to have been the real agenda, not achieving a real, working company.

On July 8, Andrew Hyde posted at Startup Weekend’s blog (created to chronicle for the world every yoga fueled moment enjoyed by the Colorado techies) “Ten reasons startup weekend is working”:

This weekend is working, really well. But why? Here is a quick list of things that come to mind

10. Humble people + talent
9. Equality of equity and mental model of meeting for a weekend and make the unthinkable possible
8. What the ‘…’ looks like in the ‘1)Idea 2)… 3)Profit’ equation
7. Passion
6. Get it done attitude
5. Opportunity to finish something beautiful
4. Support from mentors and awesome people dropping by
3. The People
2. Healthy distraction
1. The water

Yes, the water is key. Must be this budget beer.

The rambling itemization of feel good startup weekend “lessons” being learned has scant little to do with successfully planning, building or running a company. Little wonder than that the weekend’s concluding post by David the next day indicated “Brutal honesty: A failure and a success.”

Why failure? No startup was launched by Startup Weekend. Why success? A good time was had by all. What went wrong? “Here is some brutal honestly from an insiders point of view”:

They all had day jobs today to get to. So they had no ability to push the project to the production servers. As of this morning, the group of 70 people have gone back to whatever it is they do all day long. Everyone is franticly trying to reach everyone else to see if we can’t at least push the 80% working version of vosnap to the production servers at Amazon EC2. We now find ourselves disbanded with most of the team leads sleeping off the weekend.

On Friday night, the first major mistake was made. Things were just too harmonious and congenial. Leaders emerged from the type A personalities simply because they wanted to be leaders more than because they had the best experience or the most on the line… In retrospect, there was not enough healthy conflict in the early hours.

By Sunday morning, when still nobody had seen any sort of working prototype this mutiny hit full steam. By Sunday evening, things seemed fine again. We were shown a reasonable working version by about 6pm. The energy level went way up in the room and we pumped out more buzz-crap in anticipation and with confidence.

It was then announced that it was midnight or bust. At midnight, we had to leave the temporary office we had gotten the use of for the weekend. The live camera went offline for good. A group of about 8 developers migrated elsewhere for web access and this was all that was left of the team. By 3 am this morning, they were ready to launch *something* but were crippled by the timing and the disbanding of the group. Nobody had the right passwords to the production servers, or whatever. It didn’t get done.

problem #1 - The leaders who emerged did not clearly understand that this was a launch or bust proposition, and didn’t manage effectively towards it. But it’s not the fault of the leaders who emerged. It’s the fault of the leaders who didn’t - and I put myself in that category. I was more interested in the experiment than in making sure that it worked.

Problem #2 was that the expectations of the group at startup weekend didn’t really match the expectations that we set forth to the world. Having spent almost the whole weekend with these 70 folks, it was clear to me that this was a social experiment from the start. It was said often and early in the room that if we launch the site on Sunday night, that this would be a bonus. But this is not the image that was set forth to the world. This is nobody’s fault but ours, obviously.

Gwen on Startup Weekend “success”:

Highlights of the weekend, for me at least:

-the sheer number of blogs, tweets and updates to sorts of all sites happening in real time, around me (felt at times like we were inside a newspaper and had to publish by Monday morning)
-the feeling like I was part of a team with years more expertise than me, teaching & guiding us
-the yoga
-the jokes around the creative team about “boxes”
-the evening group walk to Chipotle. Gotta say it…we looked like a ragtag bunch, but loveable every minute!
-the massage therapist, Jen!
-the 2nd massage giver, Gwen!
-Gambit, the Hedgehog. Showing up in the eleventh hour to sniff us out and raise our spirits

Because I don’t normally operate in an unlit, poorly ventilated room, I’ve been in bed sick all day. Even though the weekend for me felt like I was in an airplane for 72 hours…it was one of the best 72 hour stretches of my life. It was like a compressed version of camp when I was a kid. I wanted a t-shirt in the end with everyone’s real & twitter name on it. I look forward to deepening the relationships w/you all now that “real life” has begun again.

I love you guys!!

Bottom Startup Weekend line: Camp Web 2.0? YES

Route to entrepreneurial achievement? NO

PLUS: Battelle on Facebook vs. Google: Zuckerberg is NO Brin or Page and Scott Heiferman: Who Needs Google Rocket Scientists! Meetup Engineers Rock

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN