Ended up working with some startup weekend veterans (and some n00bs) on BItter.

I actually did see the poster, but I didn’t find them distracting and that wasn’t what I was referring to. At SSW2, there were multiple people whose sole purpose in being there was to recruit. They didn’t join a team. They just recruited. I got sucked into a recruiting pitch at one point because somebody asked if I might be help to help out. It turned out that “help out” didn’t mean that weekend, it meant help out the startup that already existed and needed additional people to work for free. No thanks. In contrast, Garrett was on the know n show team. If he did any recruiting beyond the poster and a few tweets, I didn’t see it.

I do like to learn new things, but I don’t think I’m the type of person who learns well by working with others. I feel I learn new things best on my own, working on my own projects, reading the documentation, and trying things as I go. I can totally understand people who’d like to use Startup Weekend as a chance to learn new things, I just don’t think I’m one of them.

“I didn’t see people trying to recruit people to join pre-existing companies.”
You must not have seen this or this?

@Garrett:

“groups that get funding and actually form into real companies” – That could be cool, but I think it is unlikely to happen with groups that have just met each other. In a startup, team chemistry is very important, and the likelihood of a team formed over a weekend having good chemistry isn’t very high.

A businesses’ success is not a popularity contest, which is the only thing that the iPhone app won.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the prize money didn’t factor into it for me. I decided to go with Azure Friday night because of the opportunity to have Azure experts around to ask questions of. I certainly didn’t feel any restrictions. I don’t think the competition aspect hurt this one. Overall, the event was way better than the last one. I didn’t meet a single person who brought an already-existing project that they were trying to find people to work on for the weekend. I didn’t see people trying to recruit people to join pre-existing companies. And there were fewer people who didn’t join a team and just wandered around for the weekend. I met a lot of new people and I had worked with six people who I had never worked with before.

On the voting, I was surprised we voted at all — at the outset, I was expecting the BizSpark folks to pick a winner just like H-Farm did and I have no problem with them making whatever requirements they want. Undoubtedly H-Farm had their own set of requirements — they just didn’t publicize them. As it turns out, at SF Startup Weekend last weekend, there was a spontaneous investment from the audience during the demos. Pretty cool!

The MSFT sponsorship was not perfect. The presentations on Friday night were a waste of time — I would have loved to see code which would have helped us on Saturday, but instead we got marketing talks. Kevin Leneway (a smart guy) showed us a video geared toward people who’d never heard of cloud computing when he could have walked us through building Hello World on Azure. And the demo of multi-touch was a complete non-sequitur. Cool, yes. Relevant, no. I, for one, would love to see pre-weekend code clinics from Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. to help people who come with the same objective as me — to try new technologies and to learn.

Dan, in my opinion, Startup Weekend should not be a competition. If it turns into a competition, people will start to plan things in advance, gather a team in advance, pick a project in advance, etc. That’s not the point. The point is to meet new people, work with them, try to see if you can implement random ideas in a weekend. Or, at least that’s what I think it should be about.

It was definitely something that my team did talk about and we decided to stay in the running by using Azure instead of AWS.

Search Kick, by coincidence, won the first two. (and left with 10K, which is amazing)

Learn That Name, the iphone app, won the third one.

Nobody was disqualified. we did not want to force people to use our tools, but it s also important for us to reward a project who has the potential to become a future partner for us. We seriously hope they will create a company.