In short: Mind-blowing AMAZINGNESS that you can never truly understand until you participate in one yourself.
In long....
I was meeting with my graduate advisor about my upcoming research project when a conversation something like this took place:
Advisor: We’re hosting a Startup Weekend, you should come!
Me: (With slight hesitation) Ok.
I checked my calendar and made sure the children would be cared for while I was at the full-weekend long event, but I pretty much signed up because she told me to. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Quite frankly, I have a lot of anxiety about new and unfamiliar things, and I had a couple weeks to get myself all worked up about it, so I almost didn’t even show up. I had no idea what I was hoping to get out of the weekend because I had no idea what I was walking into. My purpose for attending was loosely tied to an independent study course I was completing over the summer, wherein I would learn more about coding and find ways to continue to promote the participation of girls in tech so they could become women in tech careers. Startup Weekend is for tech start-ups, so I guess that fit.
I watched the promo videos on the Startup Weekend website and tried to get myself excited. I tried to come up with some sort of idea, but I came up empty. Finally, the Friday of the event rolled around and I dragged myself to this thing that I had no idea what it was, or why I was devoting an entire weekend to it, but it ended up being a lightening-fast, wild-ride with a wonderful outcome.
Friday evening I got there waaay too early and no one else was there yet. In normal life I’m a very social person, but in brand-new situations, I am an observer first and don’t talk much. I sat quietly by myself observing each new person that walked by, wondering what their motivation was for coming, until we were invited into the dining room for dinner. At dinner someone sat down next to me and started a conversation. I’m happy to chat I just don’t like to be the one to start it. We had a great conversation over dinner, and we got to know the other lovely people who sat down next to us. I started to get a better idea of what this weekend was about, but I still had no idea how I was going to make it useful to me. When dinner was done we went downstairs to our general meeting area and we met Roger.
Roger was our MC for the weekend. He got really excited and kept talking too loud into the microphone and making the amp turn off. He started telling us how amazing Startup weekend was and how we could meet our new business partners and how we could actually start a real company. I found all of this a bit hard to swallow because I still didn’t really know why I was there. He finished his spiel, we did some ice-breakers and then the pitches began.
Anyone who came to the event with an idea for a tech startup, related to education, was given 60 seconds to pitch their idea. Then we anonymously voted on the ones we thought we might join, and from there the number of options was reduced. After the reduction we had to join a team. Of the 10 original pitches, only 2 were interesting to me and only one of them made the cut, so I nonchalantly bolted my way over to the one that interested me and I instantly got nervous. There were lots of people here and only 6 people could be on a team. I decided I had to sell myself or I would get stuck on a team that was completely uninteresting to me. I gave the idea holders my credentials of being a grad student interested in increasing participation of girls in STEM and they liked me.
Phew! I got on a team that I wanted to be on.
Saturday and Sunday consisted of refining the problem our product would address, doing market research, and creating a business plan. Then we worked to refine the pitch to explain why our product was needed and important. I won’t give you the play-by-play of every minute of the weekend but what transpired over those two days was nothing short of miraculous.
Let me give you a quick back story. I am a licensed Middle School Science teacher. At the end of this past school year I quit the job I had been in for 3 years because it wasn’t going to be flexible enough to let me be a part of getting my son off to school in the morning when he starts Kindergarten this fall. I vaguely had a plan to try to get myself into doing professional development for teachers related to computer science/coding/STEM/etc., but had no idea how to get there.
Over the two days of Startup weekend, the team I joined migrated from being an idea focused on getting cheap, kid-friendly robots, into the hands of more kids (which was only peripherally related to my interests) into a group dedicated to providing professional development for teachers to help improve outcomes for girls and minorities in technology fields. It became the exact job that I wanted to do, and folks, WE MADE A COMPANY! JUST LIKE EXCITED ROGER SAID WE WOULD! (Roger was awesome, by the way). Oh, and the icing on the cake was that we won the pitch competition at the end of the weekend! Ironically that was kind of disappointing because the whole premise of the weekend is that you fail hard and you fail fast so you can move on to better ideas, but then we won, so we failed at failing. Does that mean our company will fail, because we failed at failing in the first place?
Code Kitty is now in its infancy, but we are hoping to grow to become a major player in the Twin Cities market, providing high quality professional development related to robotics and coding. We want to increase the participation of girls in tech and women in tech careers, and we all met by chance, at a Startup Weekend. So if anyone ever tells you they are hosting a startup weekend. You should go.