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This post is intended for people who will attend a Startup Weekend event for the first time.

Why attend a Startup Weekend?

• It’s a better networking event compared to daily events. You’ll cooperate together to achieve a common goal, you’ll suffer together, you’ll have fun together. Overall, you’ll spend more time together, and form stronger connections.
• If you have acquaintances that you think highly of, but never worked with before, Startup Weekend is the perfect opportunity. You can think of it as a laid-back 54 hour interview for identifying possible startup partners.
• You’ll meet like-minded people. You’ll have fun. You might even start a company!

So, how do I choose which team to work with?

• Don’t choose an idea, choose a team: Even the brightest idea will not get far if there isn’t a good team behind it. Make a good compromise between an interesting idea and a good team. Make sure you team has enough back-end & front-end developers, as well as graphic designers if you’re building a web application. 
• Think twice before joining a large team: (More than 10-15 people) These teams are like large companies, they are not agile. It’s harder to coordinate, reach consensus and make decisions. You’ll also be working on a very small part of the whole, which might not be as exciting.
• Make sure that others are committed: All participants should share the same vision about the product. If you see people throwing in ideas that will take the product to a different direction, it’s a bad sign. Try to anticipate if people will still want to work on this idea the next day.
• Hold up to your ideals: There will boring ideas with huge business potential. Unless your only goal is to earn money, don’t be fooled by them. Life is too short to work on boring ideas!

I spent this weekend participating in Atlanta Startup Weekend 2. If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekend idea, this is a good introduction.

Friday at 7 PM: Ninety random people with different backgrounds (software development, design, marketing, business etc.) gathered in a room to work on ideas that would lead to start-up companies.

Although some people were there to start businesses, my goal was to meet like-minded people, experience this unconventional event and have fun by working on a cool idea.

In the beginning, everybody pitched their ideas for 1 minute, and participants voted to narrow down ideas to 15. Those who made the cut were given 3 minutes for Q&A, and teams started forming.

A few teams disassembled at the end of the first night. Either members didn’t have the necessary skills to realize the project, or they weren’t committed enough to the idea. Friday was spent on discussing details of the ideas, and how they would be implemented. Teams went back home only to come back early the next morning.

Saturday 9 AM: Teams spent the whole day working on their projects. During lunch, there was a talk on intellectual property. Most of the teams had their websites up on Saturday, some were event partially functioning. Some teams stayed till late, while others went back home around midnight.

Fast forward to Sunday 6 PM: 7 teams were ready to present at the end of the weekend. Each team was given 10 minutes to demo and answer questions. I was impressed by twitpay.me (use twitter to make micro-payments, great design) and jumbis.com (one product per day, you get discounts if you agree to post about your purchase on social networking sites like twitter, facebook etc.)

Other projects from ASW2 were fuutprint (digital cards) closebuy.me (local inventory search), givingti.me (give one hour, receive one hour), seedstagerecords (invest in online musicians) and reepli (pr response tool). While some of the teams are selling their weekend projects on Ebay for $2,000, others agreed to continue working on their projects after this weekend. Overall, it was exciting, it was a fun. 

I’ll blog about lessons learned from this event in the next post. Stay tuned!

Atlanta may not be the heart of technology in the U.S. but there are many opportunities to meet like-minded people that are interested in technology here. For instance, Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs Meeting is one of the largest ones with 1000 members. It’s a monthly meeting, where a subject is chosen each month and a few speakers will present on that subject. The one I attended was on iPhone Development, people who developed iPhone applications shared their experiences and gave statistics regarding sales of their applications to an audience of 50-60 people in the room.

Another one is BarCamp Atlanta, this is a yearly event in “unconference” format. There is no predefined agenda, so participants sign-up on the sheets that are hanged on the wall to talk about a subject they want. This becomes the “schedule” of the event. I attended sessions on Erlang, distributed version control, screen scraping with Ruby, iPhone SDK and witnessed how to make ice-cream in a minute using liquid nitrogen!

Overall, these events are great opportunities to meet people with same interests. Reading about technology companies starting in garages, BarCamp felt as if people were showing the cool stuff they’ve built in their garages. I can understand how Steve Wozniak must have felt when he was showing in Homebrew Computer Club the computer he built.

What I like about these events is that they are supported by ATDC, a technology business incubator part of Georgia Tech. They take place right on campus and it’s very convenient for students to attend!

These are the ones I attended so far, but there are more events on meetup.com if you’re interested: Atlanta PHP User Group, Atlanta Web Design Group, Atlanta Cloud Computing User’s Group, Atlanta Python Programmers, Atlanta Ruby Meetup Group etc.

Here are some quotes that I’d like to remember from a book (Founders at Work) on interviews with founders of technology companies:

On hope and persistence

Joe Kraus, cofounder of Excite

“We were so naive we didn’t know we could fail, and therefore we almost had to succeed.”

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“I see way too many people give up in the startup world. .. I don’t even hear the first “no” that somebody says.”

“I was always hallucinogenically optimistic. That’s the only reason I kept going.”

Ron Gruner, founder of Shareholder.com

“Things never work out right the first time. You’ve always got to do it two or three times to get it right. And things always go wrong. So persistence is the key to success.”

On following your gut

Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes

“You take advice from a lot of people, and that advice is not always the best advice… So I might rely more on my intuition if I were to do it again.”

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“I think one of the things that kills great things so often is compromise - letting people talk you out of what your gut is telling you… If everyone agrees, it’s probably because you’re not doing anything original.”

On dreamers

Brewster Kahle, cofounder of Alexa

“San Francisco is full of dreamers. It’s the people with the new ideas. It may be bad, they may be inappropriate, they may fail, but I love the idea that we can do something new and different - something that hasn’t been done before, something that’s going to affect a lot of people”

Steve Perlman, cofounder of WebTV

“… there’s kind of an attitude here [Silicon Valley] that people should try things, and, if they fail, if they understand why they failed, they may actually be a better investment in the next round…”

On venture capitalists 

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“Venture capitalists would tell you that they’d rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution.”

Ron Gruner, founder of Shareholder.com

“You want to generate two things when you’re looking for money: One is a sense of exclusivity, saying, “This is a very special kind of deal and not everybody is going to get into it.” And secondly, a sense of urgency, so you can people to make a decision.”

On life

Paul Graham, cofounder of Viaweb

“Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the block, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least.”

“Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember what you’ve said.”

James Hong, cofounder of HotorNot

“Happiness is reality compared to expectations.”

Funny

Mitchell Kapor, cofounder of Lotus Development

It was the ’60s; I have the pictures to prove it. I don’t remember any of it, but as someone said, if you can remember the ’60s, then you weren’t there.

I wrote about Founders at Work recently. Here are some memorable quotes from this book:

On customers:

David Heinemeier Hansson, cofounder of 37signals

“First we built the audience and then we figured out a product”

Meno Trott, cofounder of Movable Type

“Having customers from day one was the thing that really forced us to be a company. If we had been just talking about a product and we had to build up a customer base and figure out how to market it, that would have been incredibly hard.”

Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines

“Basically any technology can be copied, any concept can be copied. In my opinion, what makes one of these companies valuable is the users. That can’t be copied.”

On simplicity and doing less:

Joshua Schachter, cofounder of del.icio.us

“Reduce. Do as little as possible to get what you have to get done. Do less of it; get it done… Doing less is so important… It’s the traditional “I apologize for the long letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”"

David Heinemeir Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails

Q: Was there ever a time you felt you couldn’t do all this?

Sometimes, but whenever we had those feelings we viewed them as clues that we were trying to do too much, so we’d think ”How could we make this feature require less engineering and programming?”… We aren’t producing more lines of software than everybody else; we’re just making each line count for so much more.

Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr

“I’m a big believer that constraints inspire creativity. The less money you have, the fewer people and resources you have, the more creative you have to become.”

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“I was also surprised by the success of something so simple…Simplicity is powerful.”

Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems

Work smart and not long, because you need to preserve all of your life, not just work life.

Focusing on the product:

Joshua Schachter, cofounder of del.icio.us

Q: It had been tried and failed in the past. Why did del.icio.us succeed?

First of all, because it was not a venture to start. It was building a product and that’s it.

Joel Spolsky, cofounder of Fog Creek Software

All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, just improve it.

Thinking about the future:

Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems

If you want to shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is. It’s the same with introducing technology.

Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes

“You don’t want to fill today’s needs, but try to capture some window that will happen in the future.”

On connections:

Blake Ross, starter of Firefox

“One thing I didn’t know was how tightly connected everyone is in the Valley… It’s such a small industry, and so much business is done through the network circuit … It’s more like “Who do you know”

Dan Bricklin, cofounder of Software Arts

Even though it seems like it’s big business and impersonal, and “they” take care of it, it really isn’t. There is no “they”. It always comes down to an “I” of somebody.

Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger.com

“Everyone was getting funded, but it is still completely just a network. You have to know the right people.”

 To be continued …

“Founders at Work” consists of 32 interviews with founders of famous technology companies such as Paypal, Apple, Lotus, Yahoo, TiVo, del.icio.us, craigslist, Flickr, Adobe etc. It’s about stories of startups’ early days, and contains valuable advice not only for people starting companies, but for everyone in technology business. 

It’s a great resource for learning about what the founders have been through, and how they transformed their ideas into successful companies.

Unfortunately this book represents only one side of the coin: For each success story in this book, there are tens of failures that we aren’t aware of. Nevertheless, here are some common traits I’ve realized after reading these interviews:

• Practice makes perfect: Either they have built similar products before, or had these ideas for years. When you get it right is only after you do it several times or develop that idea over time.
• Change is inevitable: Their product or business model changes a lot during the course of building it. Either the end product is a small part of what they initially thought they’d build, or the business model they had in mind doesn’t work and they try a completely different one.
• Focus on the future: They start at time when a new technology (computers or internet) is about to take off, or when a business opportunity does not exist yet.
• Solve your own problems: They get inspired by their own problems, things that bug them.

Overall, companies with interesting ideas had more interesting stories to tell. I highly recommend reading this book!

Lately, I’ve been thinking that everything is about user experience. We buy brands that make us feel special, we use beautiful products that provide a good experience. We love people that treat us well. What matters is how you feel, it’s all about the experience…

I bought a new bag for two reasons: (i) It looks great, I’m pleased every time I see it (ii) It’s in line with “less is more” philosophy 

I’ve learned to embrace constraints, in fact, I’m deliberately introducing constraints in my life. This bag is very small, so I can only fit my laptop, it’s accessories, a book and maybe a notebook. That’s it, but isn’t that all I need for school?

I’m amused when I see people walking around with huge, heavy backpacks. It seems as if they’re carrying their whole house on their back.

There are so many things I could put in there If I had some extra space. But the point is, I can live without carrying all that stuff with me, so I don’t really need them, do I?

[Note to self: "The things you own end up owning you"]

Randy Pausch, a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, passed away from pancreatic cancer in July, 2008. One year ago, on September 18th, 2007, he was one of the speakers in a series of lectures called “Last Lecture”. The idea was, “If you had one lecture to give before you died, what would it be?”

Sadly, he knew this lecture was one of his last ones, so he gave an inspirational talk titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. This motivational talk is about life and living. He gives examples from his career about overcoming obstacles and shares the lessons he learned throughout this journey. It’s about an hour long, but definitely worth watching. I especially enjoyed the twist at the end

If this is not enough to convince you, I’d say the book version has been #1 on Amazon’s Best Seller list for a long time. Rest in peace Randy Pausch …

Getting Real is one of the books that helped me look at software development from a different perspective. The title of the book is “The easier, smarter and faster way to build a successful web application”, but it’s really the manifesto of 37signals, a web application and design company that’s been influential to the whole community with successful products like Basecamp and by creating the Ruby on Rails web framework.

The book is provocative and explains 37signal’s philosophy about creating simple solutions. You’ll read suggestions like “Keep it simple, keep it small” or “Perfect is the enemy of good, do it quick. Not perfect, just do it.” I can tell you that these principles apply to graduate school as well

Some of the lessons I’ve learned are:

• Ignore details, perfect it later
• Constraints help you figure out your priorities, guide you to creative solutions
• Your advantage is agility, ability to change, lower cost of change by building less software
• Bigger problem isn’t scaling, it’s getting to the point where you have to scale
• Take sides, don’t try to please everyone
• Best programmers are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter

Each chapter is short and simple, and contains good advice. They were kind enough to provide an online copy for free if you’d like to start reading this book.

There’s a funny anecdote in the book: They launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers. They had 30 days to figure it out, which forced them to come up with a simple solution. I think it’s really a bold move

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In a talk at Startup School, a developer asks a question:

Q: I’m in front of my computer 10-14 hours a day, supposed to be working on writing code, but I spend a lot of time distracted surfing the web. What advice can you give?

The reply he gets is:

I think the problem is you’re trying to work 14 hours a day. Who the hell gets anything productive done for 14 hours a day? Try working 5 hours a day, if you had only 5 hours a day to spend on something, you’d focus your time a lot better.

I’ll do my best to change my lifestyle according to this philosophy.