Is the startup community relying too much on fate? Connecting the outliers | Hacker News Reader

Is the startup community relying too much on fate? Connecting the outliers

tenzerolab.com

24 pointsmikepk14 comments

I've been involved recently in a local incubator YCombinator/Tech-Stars type program (BoomStartup in Salt Lake City). For a while they would have some sort of get together every Friday (mostly to discuss the program and let people meet those involved). I thought it was interesting that the vast majority of people that showed up were "business people". While I'm sure some of them are legitimately worthy of being called a business person, for most of them, that really just meant "want to start a company and can't code". We also had alot of issues with people being too paranoid of having their ideas stolen to feel comfortable talking about their ideas.

I'd love to see someone come up with a good way for the right people with the right mindset to come together and socialize in order to help form teams.

Regular socializing is a first good step but it seems like the real filter, the way to get at the people you want, is to get people doing. When you're actually working on a project (even a small project) you learn pretty quickly who actually gets things done and who wants to be the "idea guy", occupy volume, and waste precious oxygen.

I think as technology / hacker types we tend to undervalue the business side of the equation though (I know I did). My experience with my first startup was made a lot more difficult by the fact that no one in the company was really business/marketing/sales focused. There are valuable business skills that can help an early stage company but the question is, how do we filter and find the real business "makers".

I think we can come up with ways to move people's various projects forward by small increments. I led a discussion at Boston BarCamp on this topic and someone brought up the "don't want people to steal my idea" thing. I made the person mad by saying that I wasn't interested in people like that. Ideas are ways to start the conversation/process, they're not an end in and of themselves. I find people like that are (usually) not really serious about building something.

I'm working on hacking the startup process. I'm focused on the Boston area but I don't think the point in this essay is specific to Boston.

I had my own idea for dealing with this phenomenon. After reading your post I decided to try and make it a reality instead of an idea.

MiniLeap: A pickup game for startups

www.MiniLeap.com

I think minileap has some merit in a slightly different arena so to speak. I'm presuming the winners go on to polish off what they started while the "community at large" follows? I think this would be a fun way for hackers who are already friends to kill a weekend--kind of like Apple's insomnia contests for film students but for coders. My two suggestions would be 1) to think about incorporating some sort of money pot where you require users to submit like $10-20 to make things interesting, and 2) I wouldn't rule out there being two programmers per team.

Best of all, developers get to indulge all those little ideas floating around in their heads, so even if they didn't win the pot they still come away with a feeling of release. Basically, the equivalent of the one-night stand for startuppers :)

HN please review minileap!!!

That's a great idea and I'll definitely follow your progress on it (unfortunately I'm going to be traveling / out of the country that weekend). It addresses some of the problem space I'm thinking about, and I really like the short duration nature of it.

You might want to wait for the first competition to give some time for people to learn about it. This upcoming weekend is kind of short notice, but I guess if it's a regular competition you can see how it goes.

The random idea and random co-founder thing is an interesting way to mix things up but you might encounter some resistance with that approach. The distributed online nature of it doesn't address the community aspect I'm hoping to build, but I like the idea of a regular ongoing competition.

I also like your byline, a "pickup game" is a great way to frame it.

I just tweeted about this and someone reminded me about Startup Weekend. I assumed you knew about it already, but just in case: http://startupweekend.org/. Same time frame, but for SW people have to be physically present (unlike minileap) and the ideas are group sourced by the participants.

Been working on this project for a while with a friend. Just a prototype I'm making to match people based on their resources. It's really barebones right now (full documentation should be up soon) but thought this was an organic moment to drop a shameless plug. Should be able to match programmers (or anyone) based on the required skills the startup needs.

link: http://kxs.miceswitch.com/

Hope the little guy can be of some use to HN.

You leave us with a great question at the end of that essay. I'm interested in learning about how you plan to hack the startup process, especially here in Boston.

I've got some high level ideas, but most of them revolve around getting people working together, especially in a common space. I think physical proximity is important but another potential key is defining clear agreements that reduce the natural inhibitions we have to working on each others projects (especially across communities, like biz types and hackers). We have talent and passion, I think what we're lacking is trust. You can't build trust over a beer and a 15min conversation at a networking event (IMHO).

I thought there was some startup labs and incubator spaces around here?

I keep hearing about something like it at OpenCoffee and Mass Inno.

It might have been me :), I've been going to OpenCoffee a lot talking about this idea. I think this fills a gap in the ecosystem between social events and seed accelerators (that are looking for more fully formed startup teams).

I'm also definitely not the only person looking at this problem. I'm actually hoping we can bring together the various efforts trying to address this gap.

I also left the essay a little bit open ended because I'm looking for other ideas and ways to address this specific problem.

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