The Hidden Power of Startup Weekend

It’s Monday morning, another Greater Lafayette Startup Weekend is in the books.  It was a weekend of creativity and just a bit of chaos.  These events are a bit odd, a bit silly, really cool, and I wonder if they don’t just happen to teach us how to live a little bit better in our everyday lives.

If you had to describe what a Startup Weekend is, you could be brief and simply say “Energy and Optimism.”  In fact these events are filled with people that are 100% optimistic and seeking a touch of magic.  They find that magic by simply suspending disbelief for just a weekend.  Negativity and doubts are disregarded in favor of action, exploration, and wonder.  Taking nothing more than idea, everyone is trying to breath life into this idea of theirs.  Once there are some teams formed around some of these ideas, then some really cool things start to happen.

These groups of mostly strangers start with business ideas, and they try and figure out if these ideas have any legs to them.  These strangers then spend every waking moment for the whole weekend helping this team of theirs move forward.  Then at some point something else cool always seems to happen, all the other teams of strangers, start helping out all the other teams full of strangers.  Then at some point a bunch of coaches and mentors show up to bring even more help and expertise to the table.  A lot of these people are professionals that bill out their time at over $100 an hour, and they just help all weekend for free.  This creates some sort of vortex of creative energy that is hard to find in the world.  This energy unlocks things, it can unlock people.

Before long these teams will realize how flawed they are.  Most teams are lacking something pretty big they need to pull off their vision.  Web apps are hard to build without a developer.  A team may not have anyone that is good at public speaking to present their vision.  A team of engineers may not have much experience validating a market or talking to customers.  These teams are flawed, they know they shouldn’t succeed.  That story they tell themselves is bullshit.  Most of the time they cut through this bullshit and move forward.  It’s not uncommon to see people that meekly pitch an idea on Friday, stand up on stage Sunday for final presentations and own the room.  People quit thinking about what they “can” do, and just start doing, and in the process learn just a little about themselves.

As the weekend progresses people become more aggressive.  Passiveness and indecision melt away.  There is just no time for that nonsense.  People enter an attack mode, and a lot of stuff starts to get done.  A lot of first-time attendees of the weekend leave a bit surprised how much they accomplished in the weekend.  A lot can happen in the course of a weekend or even a day.  You could ask yourself why couldn’t this happen all the time?

The answers are simple.  Focus, the only thing that matters for the weekend is the team, the business, the mission, its almost like a state of mediation.  Passion, the passion people bring in is contagious.  Playfulness, people feel free to try things and experiment.  Inclusiveness, everyone finds a way to contribute to things, and everyone that enters the building is a part of the game in some way, no spectators are allowed.  We start to act a little different, and we start to get something different as a result.

Why don’t we all help each other more?  Why do we put up with our own bullshit stories in our heads?  If we all acted like this a bit more every day, where would we end up?  There is nothing stopping us from doing this all the time.  There is only the hinderance of choice.  What is stopping people from choosing passion, focus, energy, openness?  Maybe that’s what Startup Weekend is good for, learning how to unlock ourselves and get out of our own way.