It is a simple concept with thousands of complexities. Here is what I tell people:

Startup Weekend is Jazz for Entrepreneurs.

It is what happens when you get brilliant people together, using their skills to build a company they want to work on. It is a crazy idea, that countless people can point out countless holes in (and countless people just don’t get), but for some reason, it just works.
I tried to get a friend of mine to move to Boulder, and it took this crazy idea to get him to come out. Jeff has some beautiful things to say about the weekend. He now has a new job, a new career and a great outlook on life.

The concept was born out of the great, and incredibly friendly and giving Boulder Tech community, which made me ask myself, “Can you dream?”

http://vosnap.com/blog/

More Startup Weekends will be planned at StartupWeekend.com 

Devs are meeting tonight.

StartupWeeekend.com will have a new look very soon, making it easy for new weekends to plan and archiving the old weekends.  With the launch we will be announcing 5 other weekends!

The VoSnap founders chose a modification of 1 and 2.  A core was elected to run the company (basically one person from each major team).  This core group would also act as project managers for whoever wants to stay involved.

After a week, the core team has met as a whole twice.  The biggest challenge VoSnap faces now is in the developments (Devs) hands. Once the Devs have something up and running, the rest of the team will kick back into gear and work on a successful launch of VoSnap.  The milestones have been set for a July 23rd launch of VoSnap.

What is very interesting to me is the core meetings carry the same energy as the weekend did.  Even though the company is now a ‘nights and weekends’ operation, there still is a strong passion to work on and finish this application.

I was sitting at Trident today enjoying my first day without a todo list longer than my inseam, and was able to explain what VoSnap is to the manager in 30 seconds.  He had some great ideas on how he could use it for the shop, and for his life in general.  It is fun to work on an app that gets this type of reaction out of almost total strangers.

One of the founders emailed me today explaining how urgent he felt in releasing the application.  He is a developer working at a large company that releases a product about once every three years.   At first I didn’t get why he was in such a hurry.  After some thinking, I figured out that he wants to finish something, he wants to be able to explain what  he does in an interesting way at a dinner table, and almost most importantly, he wants to continue the energy and community that this weekend instilled in so many of us.

We now have 4 Startup Weekends planned around the nation and even one in Canada, which I will be publicly announcing later today.

VoSnap’s core team has a meeting tonight to discuss the release of the Beta version of the product.  One outstanding founder Steve has built a solid Alpha version that we have been using over the last few days, and it is compelling and fun to say the least.  I can’t wait to release it to everyone!  With the pressure of a weekend launch off, we are taking time to build a Beta that will be used over and over by our community.   We will be changing up the site tonight to show you more of what we are up to, and add a blog to keep everyone up to date.

The growth of this idea has been phenomenal.   It has spread throughout the world, with 13 cities requesting we come to town.  Of those, 3 have started planning and one (Houston) has set a date (the weekend of Sept. 28th).  I am seeing if this can reach to London as well.  It is going to be fun seeing this spread.

If you want to host a weekend or be part of this crazy idea, send me a note at andrew@endoze.com.

From what I could gather, the situation was that at about 3am this (Monday) morning the dev team turned in their best effort, and called it a weekend. By then, though, the sysadmins and people who knew how to deploy this thing had gone home. They all had day jobs today to get to. So they had no ability to push the project to the production servers. As of this morning, the group of 70 people have gone back to whatever it is they do all day long. Everyone is franticly trying to reach everyone else to see if we can’t at least push the 80% working version of vosnap to the production servers at Amazon EC2. We now find ourselves disbanded with most of the team leads sleeping off the weekend.

As the blogger for this event, writing almost 100 posts in one weekend, I can assure you that I am as disappointed and frustrated as anyone else that worked on this project.

Here’s an inside look at the weekend, and when we figured out that things were going wrong. Then I’ll sum up with the lessons learned and why I still think Startup Weekend was a success in one sense. Clearly it was not a success at the stated goal - to launch a startup in just one weekend. It failed.

On Friday night, the first major mistake was made. Things were just too harmonious and congenial. Leaders emerged from the type A personalities simply because they wanted to be leaders more than because they had the best experience or the most on the line. The Java platform was selected, and a design that was over-engineered for an early prototype was set in motion. People with much more experience sat on the sideline and simply watched this happen, going with the flow. I was one of them, so I know. One of the groups up front fears was that there would be too much conflict. In retrospect, there was not enough healthy conflict in the early hours.

Saturday, we had been told to expect an “ugly” prototype by around 1pm. It didn’t happen. Then we were told to expect a pretty prototype by about 6pm. That didn’t happen either. Those of us with lots of experience in watching software projects happen knew this was not a good sign and indicated likely failure. In fact, we still didn’t have a prototype by the end of Saturday! Nobody in the room had used it besides dev. A group of about 10 people starting talking in private about the fact that the product was being over engineered and not revved quickly enough. A proposal to set off a splinter group of Rails developers first surfaced then.

By Sunday morning, when still nobody had seen any sort of working prototype this mutiny hit full steam. A small mutiny was underway. By around 11am on Sunday, it was in full force and it was announced that a Rails team would set off in competition to pass the Java team. In the end, Andrew tactfully saved this by a) admitting his mistake, and b) getting the Rails team to work in concert with the Java team.

By Sunday evening, things seemed fine again. We were shown a reasonable working version by about 6pm. The energy level went way up in the room and we pumped out more buzz-crap in anticipation and with confidence.

It was then announced that it was midnight or bust. At midnight, we had to leave the temporary office we had gotten the use of for the weekend. The live camera went offline for good. A group of about 8 developers migrated elsewhere for web access and this was all that was left of the team. By 3 am this morning, they were ready to launch *something* but were crippled by the timing and the disbanding of the group. Nobody had the right passwords to the production servers, or whatever. It didn’t get done.

I woke up this morning at about 6am like a kid on Christmas, and ran to my computer to check out vosnap. Nothing but a splash page and a big WTF.

So that was problem #1 - The leaders who emerged did not clearly understand that this was a launch or bust proposition, and didn’t manage effectively towards it. But it’s not the fault of the leaders who emerged. It’s the fault of the leaders who didn’t - and I put myself in that category. I was more interested in the experiment than in making sure that it worked.

Problem #2 was that the expectations of the group at startup weekend didn’t really match the expectations that we set forth to the world. Having spent almost the whole weekend with these 70 folks, it was clear to me that this was a social experiment from the start. It was said often and early in the room that if we launch the site on Sunday night, that this would be a bonus. But this is not the image that was set forth to the world. This is nobody’s fault but ours, obviously.

So, yes, Startup Weekend failed. This is obvious. But at the same time, it succeeded in bonding the startup community here together even more tightly and giving 70 people a common goal. Five other major cities have written and want to run their own Startup Weekend. Failure is success, if you learn. I think we learned.

If there are more Startup Weekends in the future, we now know how to make them better. We understand the keys, which are:

1) To make the goals clear both inside and outside the room.
2) To make your most experienced and respected folks the team leaders. Development is hard. This is all that will matter.
3) To not be so laid back as a group about important decisions.
4) To make the Sunday midnight deadline very firm. Launch something at that time, no matter what.

So what happens next? There is a core group of about 20-30 people who plan to keep working on this. They’ll launch something in the coming days or weeks. And I’ll use it. Especially if we do another Startup Weekend.

The success here? This was a tremendous experience for everyone involved. You learn from failure and you get better. I met a ton of cool people. I’m disappointed and a bit mad. But I don’t feel like I wasted my weekend. Intellectually, I learned.

Is this is good way to do a startup? Probably not, at least in my opinion. I wondered that aloud on the first night. Most startups fail because of a failure of the team. This was certainly the case here. The odds were great that this would happen with 70 founders.

Andrew did an amazing job here. And Andrew knows more than anyone in the world now about how to build a startup in a weekend, and perhaps more importantly, how not to.

I look forward to seeing where he takes this next. Knowing him, these problems won’t slow him down one bit.

a) Planned to do it at 4am
b) Got too excited to launch it
c) The server ate it
d) People are really excited to see it

Text your answer to 44… (if VoSnap was working, we could get your opinion). Since it is not, we have the comments on this blog.

I really wish the site is live. Some core guys worked really late into the night, far past where my energy level dropped off. I awoke with excitement, wanting to see our Quick Vote application live. It was not, and I am not sure why. As people wake up today I will poll everyone to see where we are and how close we are to launching. I will keep everyone updated on the progress.

You can visit vosnap.com and sign up to be notified the minute it launches.

What Is Next?

A core team of 12 people have signed on to work to launch VoSnap and take it to a ‘post Startup Weekend’ level. We hope to launch very soon, get user feedback, improve the usability and quality of the service, and build upon what we have built.

I am going to update this site today as soon as I learn more.

We will launch soon.  We will send out an email to everyone that signed up through vosnap.com when we do launch.

Four cities have shown interest in hosting a startup weekend of their own, and I couldn’t be more excited. Please get in touch with me, I and quite a few original startup weekenders would love to come out and see your neck of the woods. Email me at info@startupweekend.com.

Til launch…

Launch coming overnight….