Come for the Ride…

If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you’d probably remember my experience at the Atlanta Startup Weekend where a group of Atlanta entrepreneurs created Skribit in 54 hours.  The experience was really rewarding and it opened up my personal network within the local community.  Not only did I meet a number of like-minded individuals, I still keep in touch with a number of them today.

Well, Startup Weekend is now looking to hop to more cities and they are allowing you to cast your vote to show your interest.  If you’d like to get the same awesome experience in your current location, go and vote!

Entrepreneurs in Atlanta, make sure you cast your vote for Startup Weekend 2!

Startup Weekend is now taking votes on which cities they should help build entrepreneurial communities for in 2008. The reason I’m saying that is because they did one heck of a job for Atlanta.

Before Startup Weekend, I had a hard time finding like-minded people around here. Even though we were probably all reading the same RSS feeds, keeping up with the same news and doing the same routine, there really weren’t any events that brought us together. (It was pretty lonely being a entrepreneur in Atlanta.) Let’s face it… entrepreneurs work till our last package of Ramen runs out and even then we’d choose working over self nourishment. Yeah… it’s pretty hard to get us off the computers unless there’s a great reason.

Luckily, Startup Weekend is that reason.

You know what they say: girls build their bond by sharing stories and guys build their bond by battling (working) together. With 60+ people and only 3 days, I didn’t personally get to meet everyone and learned what they do. However, by seeing where various people excelled and who stuck through the 3 day ordeal, the event has helped me establish a local network of peers that I can trust and go to for advice.

So if you missed out last year cause the event wasn’t near you, go vote for your city this year. Who knows, you may just meet your startup’s next co-founder there.

Whether you go nuts for New Years or could care less about New York starting every year by dropping the ball, the one thing you can’t avoid as a blog reader is to see multiple blogs doing their year in review or predictions for next year around this time.

After a month of holiday cheer and a week of laziness, many feel the need to sum up the last 365 days even though it’s really just another spin of the Earth in the cosmos. So rather than fight it, why should we be different and disappoint?

With everything that’s happened (and still happening), I would have to say 2007 has been a banner year for me. Even though this blog has only been up for a few months and the development on the service website has been slower than I liked, I’ve learned a lot this year just from changing my attitude and learning to go after it; whatever it may be.

Starting from the small things, I think I finally got over my distaste for the phone. My speech has always been something I was over conscious about; thanks to all my friends and their negative taunting throughout grade school and college. (You know, we didn’t all learn English as our first language!) Anyway, I finally decided to take my own advice of “whether you think you can or can’t (speak w/o mumbling), you’re right!” …so I’ve been trying to use the phone more even though I haven’t put a dent into my 4000+ rollover minutes yet.

Career wise, I think this was the year that I’ve matured and learned how to multi-task in ways I didn’t think was possible for me. I’ve always enjoyed managing vs. doing the grunt work and it was nice to finally to be able to reach this point in my professional career and know that I can actually manage a team without losing more hair. The art of dishing the work to everyone else is one I don’t understand why more people don’t try to master. In all seriousness… I do still take on a lot of the tasks myself but it’s definitely a great feeling when you teach and see others advance in their career while getting work done.

Networking has also played a big role for me in 2007 and it’s one thing that I highly recommend everyone especially startup entrepreneurs to go out and do. (The key is to do it in person, not hiding behind a computer.) I’ve been living in Atlanta for about 2 and a half years and for the longest time I thought I had to go get an MBA at Emory or Ga. Tech to access those alumni networks. Of course, this also nudged me to look at housing in Silicon Valley to better reach that pool of talents. However as it turned out, I was able to meet people in all three networks without taking classes or moving to the west coast.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook and Craigslist provided most of the networking opportunities for me to meet people from all over and learn about local events that I could attend to meet like minded people. Having participated in the Startup Weekend also showed me and the Skribit co-founders that Atlanta wasn’t dry of talent; we just didn’t have a clear way to network and find each other. From there, a number of opportunities have opened up and my network of contacts who have different strengths have definitely exploded. Granted, there were still some duds in the mix and I have met people this past year who just didn’t know how to network or follow up… but practice makes perfect and like dating, you just have to get yourself out there.

Along with the good, I’ve made conscious decisions to ditch some of the bad. For me, improvements aren’t just made by adding smarter and more positive people to your life, it’s also about shedding the ones that drain you emotionally or otherwise. Had Michael Vick shed the fat in his circle, he may not be in jail right now… or maybe he masterminded the whole doggy daycare gone bad thing; who knows? In any case, there were people I’ve met down here in my first year that have become unstable and it definitely did me a lot of good to distance myself from them. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see where our different paths take us in a couple of years.

So what’s in store for 2008? Well, with a broader understanding of my industry and real people to talk to when I need support; I actually feel like 2008 will be fabulous, instead of it being just another year.

Hopefully with hard work, everything will work out as planned!

For the people who have been following this blog, we posted a video of Truemors a couple of months ago where Guy Kawasaki talked about how he started a web based business with $12k and a few weeks of time. Well, after this past weekend, Guy posted a truemor about the Atlanta Startup Project, Skribit and how we were able to start a web business with $0 financing.

Well $0 is of course a stretch, there were SOME costs… but what does $0 really mean? Well, here’s the dirty dirty truth based on my observations.

$50 in domain names - I don’t have the hard numbers but in registering our name and in registering a few more variations to protect the brand, we’re looking at least $50 in expenses.

$1,000 in legal, misc fees. I admit, I completely ignored this part of the project, on purpose. I can’t wrap my head around it.

$2,400 in food - we were fed; a lot… I can’t say they were all great or healthy food, but we were well fed. There was also a ton of beers and drinks and so forth. If we didn’t have this, people wouldn’t stay.

$5,000 in office space - I’m not sure of the actual costs but I’ll throw in $5,000 as an estimate for renting the entire floor of where we needed to be. In addition to the main room, the various groups worked out of several different, smaller conference rooms which was necessary or we’d probably end up with nothing.

$96,000 in laptops/equipment - If the 64 people who showed up came with just pen and paper, we probably wouldn’t have accomplished too much in the 54 hour period. If you estimated the avg. laptop cost to be $1,500, then there would be close to $100,000 in equipment alone.

$185,000 in free labor - We worked about 36 actual hours… So if our average comes out to be $80 in consulting fees x 64 people, then that’s how much work we’ve put in in that time.

Priceless - Things we got for free due to networking. Things we will get for free as a result of this weekend’s networking. We got a few freebies from this weekend. A few months of web hosting… a few connections into the blogger world, connections to VC’s in the event this project takes off. All great and amazing things if you’re a struggling startup.

Even MORE Priceless, internal networking - You know how hard it is to find people who don’t make excuses, have a variety of talents, hop over any and all obstacles and apply that determination to businesses? Close to impossible. I’m really glad I was able to experience it cause… without seeing it for myself, it would have been hard to believe.

So is free really free? No, not really. Even though I worked about a week’s worth of hours in 2.5 days, I guess the difference is that we all think this project may turnout to be greater than the $290,000 of Monopoly money (and effort) we invested.

All I’ve gotta say is… if it’s possible to get $300,000 to start a company, find a group of smart business “snipers” who come in, do what’s needed and hop out, I would be all over it. After all, in the web world speed and execution is way more valuable than the alternative.

It’s been a long, hard, smelly but rewarding weekend. I seriously had planned on going home at about 3PM today to get some much needed sleep. However, working with a dynamic team of talented people that churned out stuff every few minutes; it was hard to pull away.

It was seriously like listening to the morning radio talk show on the way to work. Every time you think you are ready to pull away, they tease you with the next iteration, the next release or the next meal to make you stay just that much longer. In the end, I stayed for pretty much the whole event, but I really had to pull away at the 11th hour since I still have a day job tomorrow that I can’t sleep through.

While the event was tiring… the hard work paid off! Before the weekend even ended, we’d already got some press for our efforts.

“Duuuude! Pull up TechCrunch right now… we were just featured.” Seriously? No, you’re lying. We made TechCrunch?!

While I’m not sure what will ultimately become of this venture other than producing a cool and useful widget, it was at least great to have worked in an incubator environment that simulated a successful startup. I am definitely going keep in touch with a number of my peers from this weekend. It was a blast!