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Comment by JoelSutherland | Hacker News Reader

For the few Startup Weekend projects that have been successful, how has equity been divided?

A company called Atlanta Startup Weekend LLC owns 50% of Skribit at the moment. The LLC is comprised of all the people that contributed at Atlanta Startup Weekend last year. I am the President of the board of managers of the LLC and vote on behalf of the LLC when the need to do so arises. The rest of Skribit is owned by the active cofounders. This method of distribution is in the public domain.

Twitpay's equity distribution is not in the public domain. I will say that the cofounders who worked on the project over the weekend each received a small share.

I can only speak for Twitpay, and have no knowledge of what other companies have done. We decided to set aside 10% of the company for ASW2 participants. We had 9 team members, plus some people who helped ahead of time, and so we divided it up so everyone on the team got 1%, plus another 1% to split up among those others.

The remaining 90% we structured in a typical startup fashion, after people had a chance to decide if they wanted to continue, and what they brought to the new company. Many of the original team decided to continue, which is pretty cool.

Equity is divided by the people involved in creating it, no requirements or rules.

Which have been successful?

How do you define success?

For the purpose of this conversation, let's define it as one or more of the following:

Recurring profits/issue dividends/get acquired

Unless someone has better metrics; success is hard to define.

If those are the metrics the answer is zero Startup Weekend companies are successful. I would say it is too soon to tell for many. Somewhat like a YC company at the end of a session.

I think for a startup weekend type event you have to define success as any company that follows through after the weekend and gets a non trivial amount of users.

Profits, in general, take years and may not be the best way to define success for startups (at least young ones). Profits should be the goal however.

Getting acquired is a good measure but this too, typically, takes years.

Issuing dividends...is just too far into the future for most startups.

Oh ok - I didn't really know how long startup weekends have been going for. So now we have to define what a non-trivial amount of users/traffic is :).

Probably the most important thing is growth.

Another thing to think about is the main goal of Startup Weekend is not to create companies, but to build community.

Good point. And it seems like it's been very successful at doing that. It'd just be awesome if one (or more) of the startups made it big.

I was referencing the OP's comment noting the few Startup Weekend projects that have been successful. Which projects are among these few?

In general, though, I would go with a lower bar than fallentimes's suggestion. How about any company that is now incorporated and could be seen on a path to being something that someone would want to acquire, i.e. has any of these properties: is actively hiring, has raised money, is generating profits, and/or has a significant (>20K?) and growing user base?

I can only speak for those I know.

Both Skribit and Twitpay are incorporated.

Skribit will hire its first full time person in January upon closing a small round. The company has significant user traction: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/skribit.com/?metric=uv

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