Von Vaughan Vagaries

Disclaimer

Before you dive into this not-so-short summary of my weekend at StartupWeekendYYC understand that in parts I am critical of certain elements, even people from the weekend.  This is not be negative but it is there to serve as an alternative to all the fanboying that tended to go on throughout the weekend.  I can appreciate positive spirt as much as anyone, especially its ability to nurture success in this kind of an environment, I’m just being honest.

Additionally I will try not to get hung up on the details of the ideas from the weekend - if you want to know more you can always ask me. 

Getting In.

I can’t remember the first time I heard about StartupWeekendYYC although I’m sure it came from the Twittersphere.  It piqued my interest as I try and attend more and more digital events, network, develop my brand etc. but the week itself was chock-a-block full, it was gonna be $99, it was gonna be the entire weekend and I really didn’t think I had an idea to pitch.  So I chalked it up to, maybe next time.  Then I got wind of Cybera and how I could Win free registration to StartupWeekend YYC. All I had to do was finish this sentence:

The first step to creating a succesful startup is…

To which I responded…

perfecting your elevator pitch.

And hoorah - I won! Mucho thanks to Cybera for their support and my free ticket.  I cleared my plate for the weekend and started looking forward to this little beast with some excitement and nervousness. 

Friday

Arriving

Took me a while to track down CoWorkYYC (a Ramsay, Calgary based office made for a coworking environment of various contractors and consultants), the gracious host space of the event and even when I walked in the door I wasn’t quite sure if I was in the right place.  Thankfully it didn’t take long for me to spot @derekmajor, a throw back from my days as a Bow Valley Flame stay at home defenceman with Derek in net, who was also attending, as a mentor.   Right after that I met Devesh Dwivedi one of the organizers who got me going with a name tag and from there it was a bit of mingling and such.  Regrettably though I had been hung up helping a friend prior to the event so actually ducked out to find some Vietnamese to take back to CoWork while I still had time.

Opening Ceremonies

Justin Nowak and Devesh kicked things off with a bit about themselves and then gave the floor to Patrick Lor.  I have had the pleasure of meeting Pat before, although quickly, at a DemoCamp in Calgary so it was nicer to get a feel of him through his presentation that quickly ran through who he was.  Nice to see a guy committed to supporting entrepreneurs and as nice token he gave out business cards that gave you a few credits via a promo code for his company’s (Fotolia.com) stock photography collection.  Considering that gets you two small images or one medium it was disappointing later on when working on my startup to discover after registering and giving over my cell number to receive some stupid confirmation code, I could still only use one on my account. 

From there Thubten (TUBE-ten) Comerford the StartupWeekendYYC moderator was introduced. Thubten travels around to different startup weekends around North America to help them off the ground, facilitate them, etc. He laid the initial ground rules and then we were on to the pitches, but not before some sage advice that changed my own mind about what I might pitch.  

Paraphrase - Do not pitch your baby here, do not pitch your pet project.

Finally, one of the organizers commented on the fact that it was nice to see a few ladies out for the weekend, even if it was only 2/25… they are apparently quite the sausagefest.

Perplexion - Why would something like a StartupWeekend with no obvious gender implication, only basically attracts men?  I think the lack of female contribution really hurts the whole event.  Ideas, perspective, critical thinking - without some female input - things just aren’t reaching their potential.  As one of the two girls would be a no show for most of the weekend I felt lucky to be on the only team with female input.

The Pitches

I found it very disappointing and surprising the lack of pitch work that people had prepared in advance.  I was going for free, a little at the spur of the moment after an insanely busy week so I didn’t have much of a prerogative going in but I thought most others would, they didn’t.  Most people seemed to have come more to contribute to an idea or a team than anything else.  Thankfully, several people just came up with pitches on the spot (like myself) and eventually we got up to around 15 or so including some “freebies” pitched by Justin and Devesh, the organizers, who wouldn’t be able to lead them.  Regrettably, many pitch concepts already live in various incarnations on the web  and the pitchers didn’t seem to know about them (my own pitch included as Patrick Lor would soon tell me!! Although to clarify, he showed me a site, I was talking about an app :).  Many pitches were also a little ridiculous,  but none of the ideas were as ridiculous as one attendee who was a professional rabble rouser.

From not having a Facebook account (I can applaud this) and saying so in a manner as to assume he feels they are BigBrother or some ultimate evil to not being OK with his idea even making it onto Facebook (as we used a Facebook voting app for the to vote for the top pitches) to putting all three of his votes behind his own idea - he wasn’t terribly missed when he decided not to return.  Others would not return as well, one guy who pitched and was not selected as a Top 5 ended up leaving to apparently pursue his ideas on his own - good on em for pursuing his idea - but why not stick around?  

Epiphany - Some people aren’t willing to play a game by other peoples rules and will just pick up their toys and go home.  Not the kind of team members anyone needs.

Then there was the gentleman who related the concept of how difficult it was to get your Statement of Purpose reviewed when you are a foreign student applying at a university.   His concept to setup a network to facilitate this I thought really had a solid foundation, until he basically stated he didn’t need anyone to work on it with him except for maybe a designer.  As a developer he felt he could do it all.

Perplexion - Apparently some people who have their own idea, who want to do it themselves, who want to be absent for more than half of the weekend, still want to PAY to attend a StartupWeekendYYC.  Perplexing. Dude, just put the money towards post-it notes and coffee next time.

Anyhow, in short order we had arrived at the 5 top ideas whose pitchers were then given a bit more time to repitch them and call out the talent they need. The day before Friday I had had coffee with an old professor and bounced the idea of the weekend off of her asking her what she thought would be important for me to consider going into the weekend.  

Words to live by - Don’t follow a good idea with a bad leader, follow the person you can work with and the idea will take care of itself.

With that in mind it was a no brainer for me to follow Pragati.  The passion for her idea was clear, she had her cue cards ready to go and seemed very personable.  

Talent Entropy

With ideas and team leads chosen it was time for teams to form, so the different leaders held court in the various office spaces around CoWorkYYC as various attendees popped their heads in to ask questions, see who else was on the team etc.   Soon enough though we were locked in as a Business Analyst - Pragati (who even though her name tag said Business Analyst constantly referred to herself as a computer engineer), a Marketer - Joel and me, the developer/business analyst/marketer along with our part-time designer Luis Berumen who ended up working for all the teams as he was the only designer attending and ended up #killingit!  We had a PR person too but well about 4 hours of commitment I don’t think they get full billing…

Distilling the Idea

Then we started diving into the idea.  All sorts of logistical problems regarding our business model soon started presenting themselves so we did a little repivot. 

New Term Alert - Pivot - When the idea you were gonna do just won’t work.  Pick a new idea. 

Also this seems like another term I like to spread - Ideate/Ideation/Ideating - picked this bad boy up at Critical Mass - the process of coming up with ideas.

With a bit of a clearer focus (and a few conversations with my friends with farming experience) we decided to head home and regroup the next morning - I promised to bring my whiteboard!

Saturday

Didn’t load up on brekky, just a trademark Tim’s large, black w/sugar as, we had been promised to be fed and watered at SWYYC.  Delicious bagels - check!  Toaster…erm..what? No toaster?!  Anyhow, we were too busy to eat real food, I would have to live on delicous sugar laden cookies the likes of which I had been avoiding for months RE: marathon training.

Luis did an amazing job of getting us to focus on the story we were telling.  He had to split his time between all the projects but everytime we got him on our side he did incredible things for us. 

Intermission with  Small Business Rockstars

For me the highlight of the weekend came from the talks from Michelle Sklar and Jasmine Antonick.  Michelle is a fixture in the Calgary digital community who told us all about the many things she is involved with to help out entrepreneurial people like ourselves.  She has a wicked fun sense of style and contagious enthusiasm.

I hadn’t had the good fortune to come across Jasmine previously but absolutely loved her frank discussion about all the crap that should not be a part of a pitch, her awesome enthusiasm for CANADIAN entrepreneurs and the really cool events she helps put together to bring entrepreneurs, customers and investors together both here and in Silicon Valley.

A word on gender encouragement differences - it was rather interesting to see how much positivity our team and idea was met with from these two ladies.  Was it perfect? No.  Were they encouraging? Amazingly so.  In contrast, a couple other times over the weekend our idea was met with something resembling contempt from males.  It seemed they were more set on changing it enough to take ownership of it.  The contrast was rather striking.

Back to Work

Luis had got us to start thinking about the different adjectives we would use to describe our system and our main characters that would interact with it.  Joel was rocking some persona stuff, Pragati was working on some storytelling ideas.   Me, well I was trying to bootstrap a functional website.  Cloning a site I already had, duplicating a running database, and updating some server stuff as well as mockup up our initial logo and site layout.  Then, all of a sudden I was working on a Flash movie.  

We finally got Luis to do some design work for us later in the evening which was light years ahead but loosely based on the feel I gave him from the original template.   With that created, I started templating our site.   

Joel tapped out around 10, Pragati headed out about 11 and I stayed with Luis until around 1 (with the help of some beer and coffee) when it seemed fair to let the event organizer go home.  Undaunted in my goal of having a functional site to demo I went home, made a pack of Kraft Dinner, had a beer and soldiered on until 6:30 am.   A quick nap, shower and the promise of a coffee and muffin waiting for me from Pragati at the office had me on my way again at 9:15.

Sunday

The design work from Luis, while stellar, made some incorrect assumptions about what we needed so I wasn’t able to totally translate it all into the layout but nonetheless I made great progress in having a functional site with working data models, some test data, site architecture etc.   Additionally, I had to remake the Flash video at a different resolution with some new images and logos.   By lunch things were in crunch mode as Pragati and Joel worked on the presentation and I soldiered on with the side.  I imposed a code freeze at 2pm and we all ran through the presentation trying to calm Pragati’s nerves and bring out the essence of the idea.

Interaction - what interaction? Perhaps it was the small number of attendees, or a result of the space itself but intra team interaction was quite limited.  Obviously we all had projects to work on but sadly the collaboration was rather contained considering the intensity ie. basically everyone had wrapped up there stuff by mid afternoon on Sunday, there wasn’t a scramble.

The Presentations

Basically all the pitches went off without a hitch but all could have been vastly improved with some pitch help from the likes of Michelle or Jasmine.  For my part I was a little disappointed in our presentation but it also presented some of the best learning experiences of the entire weekend. 

Lesson Learned - Letting Go - It’s not something I do very well sometimes.  I can be overbearing, boisterous and even pigheaded when I disagree about ideas or priorities.  It’s not to be mean, I am just a passionate guy and sometimes that passion can get in the way, or get me in trouble.  This weekend it was Pragati’s passion we were tapping into and especially with her really wanting to see her idea through past this weekend I wanted her out front on the project so she could get used to it.   So my feelings about what could have made the presentation better aside, it was tremendous to see Pragati up front doing the presentation.  With that kind of passion and a bit more experience she’ll be #killingit in no time. 

Lesson Learned - To mockup or to demo? THAT is the question! I flip flopped on this several times over the weekend but once I saw that a working demo was within reach that was my goal which I happily achieved.  Regrettably it saw about 4 seconds of the light of day.  In the rush that is most presentations it didn’t really get a chance to show what it could do.  In the end it clearly was not necessary to have gotten the system up and working, we would have been served better by showing Luis’s gorgeous design.   If I hadn’t put in 20 hours building the site I could have put in more time to research, the presentation, the business model etc.   

The Judges

Overall, I found them to be a disappointment. Full disclosure: we finished out of first and second place prizes but I will honestly say I never thought about winning anything all weekend. Arriving late, quick introductions by Devesh and we were straight into presentations.  Granted we weren’t presenting polished, life altering products or services here but I felt they were lacking the entire spirit of the weekend.  Fostering creativity, developing talent, encouraging thoughtful reflection.  At one point a judge asked what the revenue model for a project was, which had JUST been explained by the presenter.  

The Judgement and Prizes

Given the judges engagement I felt awarding winner to actually really hurt my feelings towards the weekend.  Additionally for prizes that equated to some mentorship time it would have been nice to simply offer such opportunities to anyone who attended that would be interested in seeking them out.   Maybe intra team engagement wasn’t super high but at the end of the event we all had a lot of camaraderie about the experience and what we were trying to achieve which was undermined in my opinion.

Final Remarks

I had avoided doing a more of a deep dive into Ruby on Rails and so working on the site was a great way for me to get back into it. Meeting new people is always great and I’m especially excited about two gents I met this weekend and hopefully hearing more of their ideas and how we might work together.  I got some great perspective and learned some awesome lessons.  Regrettably I was very unclear as to the organizers/moderators/mentors roles throughout the event and certainly hope they will take on more of a coaching role in the future.  

Sometimes startups don’t know when to ask for help they don’t know they need. 

In any event, Thubten’s passion was clearly evident as he got a little choked up commenting on how excited he was about the whole weekend and how happy he was about Calgary.  The guy even books an extra day on to his trips to meet with anyone that wants to, after the event for coffee, lunch etc. 

It was the first ever StartupWeekendYYC and I understand that my expectations need to be tempered.  It is amazing that the initiative and hardwork was put into making this happen and I am OH SO THANKFUL that things like this are happening in Calgary.  Everyone’s volunteered time is greatly appreciated!!!

As for the fall when the second StartupWeekendYYC is slated?  Still on the fence.