70 strangers meet to build a startup over the weekend

Posted by Gary King on July 7, 2007
Categories: business, programming

startup-weekend.png70 people who have never met each other before have discussed online to build a startup over this weekend. It’s called Startup Weekend. TechCrunch mentions it here. The product that they are building is called VoSnap, and it’s supposed to help a large group of people agree on decisions quickly. I’m guessing that this was partly inspired by the situation that they themselves are currently in.

Every person there will have equal equity in the company that they build. This is absolutely insane – 70 equal founders of this one company where they just decided on the company’s first product in one meeting? This is going to be one heck of an interesting experiment to keep an eye on!Personally, I don’t think that anything great will come out of this group. No matter how great every one of them are as developers, it is near impossible to co-ordinate well with that many people.

I predict that people in the group will end up befriending only a handful of people – maybe 3-4 – and then code a small module of the final product together. If they do work like this, then they have a chance of building something that’s more useful than what a thousand monkeys could produce if they jammed out on keyboards!

One thing that I can picture, though, is that many of them will build startups of their own with new people that they meet from the experience, which I would imagine will be the most valuable thing to come out of the whole event.

You can see them working, live, at Ustream.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Trackbacks

Use this link to trackback from your own site.

Comments

Leave a response

  1. Adam Brucker Sunday, July 8 2007 at 12:11 am UTC #

    “I’m guessing that this was partly inspired by the situation that they themselves are currently in.”

    You’re right – good products serve a need. We set out to solve our most immediate one.

  2. Doug Monday, July 9 2007 at 12:56 am UTC #

    I know some of the people involved in Startup Weekend and have to say, they are a great bunch of people. I don’t think anyone is thinking that VoSnap is going to be the next Google, but the whole concept of putting a whole bunch of smart people together to get a product launched in a few days is very interesting.

  3. Gary King Monday, July 9 2007 at 3:22 am UTC #

    Doug, it definitely is interesting and that’s why I’m still keeping an eye on the whole project and how it turns out :)

  4. Adam Monday, July 9 2007 at 10:33 am UTC #

    Hey Gary. What an amazing experience from StartupWeekend, I am still buzzing from it! Would do SW again in a heart beat. Folks will be pleasantly surprised by the depth of the company, not simply deploying an app. Will be fun to watch and see where VoSnap goes. Thanks for the positivity! adam

  5. green Tuesday, July 10 2007 at 3:26 am UTC #

    Nothing can take place of g for next 100 years :(

  6. StartupWeekend: 70 Founders Create Company In One Weekend Thursday, July 19 2007 at 7:32 pm UTC #

    Kramer auto Pingback[...] King Gary [...]

  7. jeroen Tuesday, November 4 2008 at 3:01 am UTC #

    Thanks for your project. I like this site. KEEP IT UP..

Comments