Jeremy Tanner Life in Boulder: Every day an adventure.

Startup Weekend: A Report From The Cleaner

I’m Winston Wolfe Jeremy Tanner, I solve problems.

Startup Weekend Boston

A nice thing about Startup Weekend is, you can call your role anything you want, it doesn’t have to be serious and probably shouldn’t be. I ended up in a variety of roles over the weekend.

• Head Bouncer at Club Axon: Axon Labs is on the 4th floor of an old paper mill. It has multiple points where badge access is required. Being that there was one badge to share across all founders, first role for the weekend was to make sure that everyone was able to make it in and up. It was great to meet you all!
• Chief Transparency Officer: If you can’t make it to a startup weekend, it’s still a lot of fun to follow along at home. How much fun depends on how good the information coming out is. Jeff had the text end of the blog on lock (and his eyes on the Cohen Cup), so in addition to updating SW twitter, I shot Inside Startup Weekend, a series of short, confessional style, videos from the founders. I hope they are as fun to watch as they were to make.
• Ace Troubleshooter: When a rogue wp-cron knocked Startup Weekend sites down across the board Friday night, Jeff and I got right to fixing it. You just can’t blog onto an error page.
• Mediator: Sometimes people just need to hug it out. I make those hugs happen.

The weekend wasn’t without it’s hitches. There were some who went outside the spirit of the weekend in various ways. Some made themselves titles (Chief this, VP of that) and took them seriously. Some treated SW as the less important part of their Boston vacation. Some pushed roles onto others outside their ability or interest. The Red Sox played championship games a few miles away Saturday and Sunday. The HD camera bricked most of the way through the shoot. One of the offices had a leaky roof.The weekend was full of high points too. Teams getting serious work done as those who were interested stayed. There were silly mustaches and goofy singing. 7 minute meetings featuring Yoga. A dinnertime acoustic set from Samantha Murphy. Launching the site as the Sox clinched the series Sunday night. But mostly, real friendships that transcend the weekend and the 2,000 miles from Boston back to Boulder.The weekend ended on a bum note for me as my laptop was stolen shortly before my flight out, still, it was a great experience.Lessons Learned, In no particular order,

• Titles are ok, so long as they’re not serious.
• You don’t need 3 levels of executives to manage developers on a weekend project.
• Death Cab for Jeremy - Downtown Boston and the Mass Pike are not the best places for your driver to learn how to drive stick.
• Disaster Cab part II - Just because the man drives a cab, don’t assume he knows his way around, I had to google maps the directions and then turn by turn navigate for the cabbie twice.
• Be interesting, people watching want to see an interesting story, people there want to live one, it’s a weekend, time for silly mustaches and goofy singing. Leave your lists of rules and forms at home.

Check it out! DeskHappy

Chillin With My Gnomies

This weekend I’m out in Boston for Startup Weekend Boston. I’m wearing a lot of hats (Head Bouncer, Chief Transparency Officer, Mediator), but it’s been a great time. I’ve learned a whole lot, made some new friends and helped make DeskHappy, a office fitness app. I’ll give a rundown with lessons learned as soon as the weekend wraps up. Until then, signup on the DeskHappy page, follow me at Twitter:StartupWeekend, Twitter:Penguin and on the Startup Weekend Blog  Later Gnomies!

Startup Weekend

Startup Weekend was a blur, with myself and ~60 other people taking an idea and making it a company (VoSnap) in 54 hours. Starting with meeting and narrowing the ideas down to a single one on Friday night, to Leaving the temporary space on Sunday, there was something happening every minute. Meetings every hour, (some with yoga), the temporary site going up (VoSnap.com), getting some TechCrunch love, and finally wrapping up the weekend with a pending beta release. Head over to the site and sign up to be emailed when the quick vote beta launches!