Los Angeles Startup Weekend

Hey Startup-Junkies,

By way of an introduction; I’m Tyler Willis and I’ll be blogging this event on this site, sending tweets (except when twitter is down tomorrow) and posting cell phone camera shots to my flickr. I organized the San Francisco Startup Weekend and I’m infected with the inability to escape Startup Weekend. It’s an amazing experience that I’m looking to repeat many times in the future. Now you know me, and have access to all the public information I’ll be sending out. On to Content:

Now that formalities are over, we plowed through our voting and came up with three top choices: a multiplayer game within the facebook environment, a free election system for secure online voting, and an electronic Christmas gift for our friends (tis’ the season). The Christmas gift was deemed “to easy” for our team of dynamos. So we wiped it off the whiteboard to a few scowls and the grinch’s delight.

That left us with two options:

Nothing could stop the two camps from waging battle with each other in a scene vastly reminiscent of a high school football game.  Camps on each side cheering and yelling as the match unfolds, everyone passionate about their side. All hoping that last bit of noise would convert the non-believers, pure energy!

In my experience, this battle of ideas is the peak of what I’ll dub the “omigosh” feeling that happens every weekend. Andrew uses a nice metaphor for this: the tension one feels as a roller coaster climbs the first hill, and you realize there’s no going back and you’re not quite sure what the first fall will feel like. Here people fight desperately for their beloved idea, and have probably the deepest emotional reaction to any decision of the weekend. The truth is, it doesn’t much mater. The community is the important part of this event and it’s the last few ideas out of a group of 40, it’s going to be a good idea!

So with two left, we picked CRUD - a facebook game that’s engaging and aimed at what we think is an untapped market. First order of business? Changing the name of the project will be good, but first things first.  We need to decide what the game will do, and how it will work. Once we decide the storyline of the game we can go about choosing a name.

Travis Savo pitched the winning idea and had this to say about the concept, “it’s easy to appeal to untapped areas and most importantly it’s fun and something we can build and fully deploy in a weekend, no problem.” They way everyone is talking about it, it’s got some teeth that could quickly make it a pretty big idea. This humble blogger is sold, we’ve picked the best idea for the job.

So, as always, usability is on the hook to deliver and deliver quick. We’ve been told to expect the document in less than 40 minutes. So startup fans, this begins another weekend in the boilerplate. I’m off to record some quick video and grab some z’s thanks to couch surfing.

The unstoppable team of laptop wielding maniacs shows no sign of stopping (there is even talk of sleeping here). I will be back tomorrow in full force.

Força!!