Ask HN: What is Startup Weekend like?

4 pointsrpicard2 comments

There is a Startup Weekend event being hosted at my university in January and I'm interested in participating. How do you find a team? Do people take their creations seriously afterward and expect to pursue them as a company? Any tips to help me get a better picture of how it works and whether or not I should sign up would be great.

View on HN

It depends. The one I went to, teams formed around the ideas - everyone pitched an idea, then you had to go mingle with people to get votes, then the top ten were the ideas that most people worked on.

Usually a couple of teams actually stay together for over a month, most usually fizzle after the weekend.

The one I went to tended to be a little more business-oriented than I liked (the winning team didn't write a line of code), so maybe be careful at first if that's not what you're looking for.

I think it's worth going to for at least one day. You aren't (or shouldn't be) bound to sticking with it the entire weekend.

I'm looking for something to improve my programming skills, like a hackathon. The only problem with just showing up for a day is that it costs $79 to register either way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com