It’s Sunday morning and I’m catching up on e-mail at Peet’s Coffee in Fremont, awaiting the start of the third and final day of Seattle Startup Weekend 2 (aka #SSW2, if you’re following along on Twitter).
As many of you know, I went to the first Seattle Startup Weekend, held in January 2008, and it was really a watershed event for me in terms of my involvement with the local tech/startup community. Further, the inspiration that I gathered there was (I believe) directly responsible for my Crowdify epiphany a couple days after the event. So I was very excited to hear that SSW2 was coming, and I eagerly signed up.
The turnout has been huge and sustained. Last year I think we started with about 120, of which about 60 dropped off over the course of the weekend. I’m pretty comfortable in guessing that the initial audience size was about 160 or more, and there hasn’t been a very large decline in the number of participants since Friday evening. We’ll see what today brings. I attribute the continued involvement to the fact that there are multiple startup ideas being worked on, and each person can therefore find a group that fits them best. Last year, we had one big idea that EVERYONE worked on – and if you didn’t like Skillbit for one reason or another, you were less likely to return.
Our venue has moved across the Fremont Bridge, from Adobe to Google. Initially I was excited to hear that we were going to Google – their offices have gotten rave reviews from local tech reporters, and, well, it’s Google! However, the practical experience has not been great. For starters, the room we are in is extremely loud – the walls are flat and hard, and sound waves bounce around like superballs in a dryer. More painfully, the WiFi and power have both been down for extended periods, which is sort of unforgivable for a world-leading tech company in 2009. The event organizers and the Google people have been working hard to fix the problems as they occur, but I think they are systemic rather than situational. I hope that these issues don’t reoccur today, or we’ll likely have a short day with a lot of team dispersal to local coffee shops.
Among the participants, there are a significant number of floaters. These are people who are not participating in one of the six or eight main team, but rather working on their own projects in ones or twos, or else literally “floating”among groups, contributing their specific expertise as needed. More often than not, the floaters are alumni of the previous Seattle Startup Weekend event. This confirms my general sense that the perceived upside to attending the weekend are not to launch The Next Big Thing, but rather to build community and get to know interesting new people that you may work with on other real-world projects in the future. People who have been through the experience one or more times have learned this; new attendees may come away with the same conclusion. Having said that, there are a few really neat ideas being worked on, so who knows what the market will have to say about the efforts of some of the teams.
I myself am a floater – working on an idea loosely related to Crowdify, my side startup. I have serendipitously teamed up with Eileen Quenin on a product that will build up a community of brand/product reviewers, and encourage frequent interaction between the participants and the brand managers. We have a solid and complementary set of skills – she’s a product manager with mad UI/UX skills, and I have my world-beating software development skills. It’s been a good teaming experience, and I’ve made a new friend in the community.
One of the best parts of the weekend has been reconnecting with many of the alumni from last year’s event. I’ve seen most of them at other local startup events around town, and interact with all or most of them on Twitter and/or Facebook, but there’s nothing like sitting down and really talking. I was explaining to my wife what I get out of going to startup/tech events of this sort, and for me it boils down to the literal act of communicating with smart, motivated, and optimistic people about a shared interest in a deep and meaningful way. This is not to say that we talk about Deep And Meaningful Things Found Only In Our Innermost Souls – it’s geekery and tech-talk, for the most part, but that’s our vocation *and* avocation. We live digitally, and we are passionate about the field and our contributions to it.
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