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Startup Weekend Boulder

Let's Create a Startup... or not...

What is Startup Weekend?August 7 2007

That is the most common question mailed to me by organizers. How do I explain it to others? Do you have a onesheet?

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?”

VoSnap BlogJuly 26 2007

The weekend is long over, but VoSnap still lives.

http://vosnap.com/blog/

More Startup Weekends will be planned at StartupWeekend.com 

Dev meeting, new site + SwagJuly 16 2007

Swag is in!  We have our VoSnap Moleskins for all our great founders.  I will make this a tradition to all the weekends I go to.

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!

Nights and Weekends for VoSnapJuly 16 2007

We set off to build a web application in a weekend.  It was the first Startup Weekend and we learned numerous lessons on what to do and what to avoid.   At the end of the weekend there were four choices relating to the question ‘what to do next’ the group chose from:
1) Everyone keep working on the app when they could
2) Elect a core team to run the company
3) Elect a CEO to run the company
4) Not finish the app

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

Moving ForwardJuly 12 2007

First let me say thank you to all the founders from last weekend.  We had an amazing group put in some serious hours.  It is now Thursday and I am almost fully caught up with the thousand emails I received on the event.

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.