Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat

City in the spring of 2011. The idea was to let people create videos on their iPhones that looked like a series of stop-action photographs. He had heard every successful entrepreneur he's met tell him that the team was “absolutely critical.” After the event, he wrote the following on his blog: “Every time I hear this, I nod my head and say, ‘oh yeah, of course that's important’—without necessarily understanding the team dynamics that you need in order to execute.” He didn't know his teammates before they came together, but “from the second we sat down and started working, it was seamless. It was something I hadn't really experienced before, not even in college and the multitude of group projects I had to complete.”
    Before coming to Startup Weekend, Gavronsky had tried and failed to launch two other startups. “I finally realize [that happened] because the teams [I built] weren't strong enough. [It wasn't] due to a [missing] skill set or domain expertise, but rather to the lack of chemistry and ability to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. Once you are able to do this—and work seamlessly like we did—it creates a passion and relentless determination to execute perfectly.”
    Finally, make sure you are absolutely clear about your interests and plans when you are talking to people about joining your team. Do you want to pursue this project in the long term? Is this just something you're trying out on the side? Do you expect to become the CEO of this company with the other team members working for you, or do you hope that you'll all be partners in the startup that comes out of this? There is no right answer to these questions. While we do think that the CEO model doesn't work as well in a three-person operation, of course, the most important thing is being transparent about your motives and your plans. There should be no surprises come Monday morning.

     

Chapter 3
     
    Experiential Education
     
    Step Outside Your Comfort Zone While Working Together as a Team
     
    Now you're ready to get down to the work required in launching a startup. Think of Startup Weekend as a kind of education—what the experts call experiential education .
    One of our core beliefs at Startup Weekend is that in order for entrepreneurs to learn, they must do . Attendees are expected to work with a team at each of our events. They are encouraged to use their creativity to brainstorm, innovate, and problem solve, and use their analytic skills to build solutions, overcome obstacles, and meet real market needs. Regardless of whether a person comes from a tech background or spends her day immersed in business, everybody is asked to tap into all of their talents in order to come up with solutions.
    The Startup Weekend Core Team spends a lot of time explaining this theory and proving that experiential education works. Yes, it is often messy, and it is pretty much always unpredictable. But when you force people to dig deep into themselves and their abilities, you're able to draw more out of them than they knew they had to give.
    The best analogy to this process is probably learning languages. Sean Kean, the former flight attendant and attendee of multiple Startup Weekends, told us that he spent six years studying Spanish and never used it very much. He says he “can't do anything functional in Spanish.” But he spent a year and a half in Japan and is now fluent in Japanese. Coming to Startup Weekend is like “going there”; in other words, it's total immersion in startup culture.
    Michael Marasco has set up a program at Northwestern University called Nuvention that is based on the experiential-learning model. He explains his reasoning behind having students actually start up an organization in his class, rather than just looking at case studies of other businesses that have been launched: “We want to help students understand [how] the process [that