Ask HN: Anyone been to startupweekend?
Planning on attending startupweekend in NYC tomorrow. Any words of advice from your experience would be much appreciated.
Startup Weekend Brussels, #1: january 2011 About 90 attendants, 45-50 pitches. Some were good, some were bad, some were clones (groupon anyone?). I joined a great team led by the (then) Brussels director of Founder Institute and had an amazing time. We ended up second (should have been first, but I won't go into details) and that was that. He made a company out of it and recently raised $2m, moving all operations to Sillicon Valley (he is from SV originally, but lived in Brussels for a couple years). You might've read about it on TC. Company is Scanadu, @scanadude on Twitter.
Startup Weekend Brussels #2: october 2011 Fully booked, I'd say about 90 still showed up. If I have to guess, only 25-30 pitches, most were terrible. Ideas chosen were quite bad, a couple opportunistic people won the pitches which is okay I suppose. The one idea which I liked (I kid you not: one) was one I had actually worked on before, before the "founder" disappeared and we just faded. Pretty good project, but from the pitch I could tell the focus was wrong. They also had too much interest (well over 10% of all votes!!) and a team that was too big, so I went home and didn't come back.
All in all, worth trying. Go see what's going on, it could be a lifechanging experience. If nothing else, you lost some money (or to look at it from the bright side: bought expensive food and drinks, as well as an office for a weekend)
The winners generally have something more than a good pitch at the end of the weekend. A demo of some sort says a lot more, to the judges, than a lot of fancy slides.