Sometimes, things live up to the hype. Sometimes, things are all that you hoped for and more. Sometimes you get more out of something than you put in.

Such is the case with Startup Weekend. Here’s how it works.

You show up on Friday night with 80 of your closest friends (of which 90% are strangers). You take turns listening to those pitching ideas (the pitch can take no longer than one minute). When everyone is done pitching (there were about forty in all), you vote on the idea you would like to work on for the weekend. At that point, you and your team start working together day and night until 4:00pm on Sunday afternoon.

At 6:00 pm on Sunday, you show up at the Kaufman Foundation building to present your idea and hopefully demo your product. Below I captured behind the scenes video from our startup and Reed Porter captured the demo.

My takeaway: It was easily one of the most fulfilling experiences of my professional life of fifteen years. The team really came together and our collaboration created a kind of alchemy that we used to fuel each other and our success. As Simon Kuo said in the video we went from “0 to code in less than 50 hours,” and it I’m really proud of what we accomplished.

Check out TopChirp.com

Posted: 04 May, 2009 | [8] Comments
Categories: 2009 , startup By: Banky.