Whittling down the ideas

In an online interview, Andrew Hyde describes Boulder’s opening night and how things get started in a StartupWeekend:

“I wanted everyone to get to know each other, start the weekend with a friendly feel. The idea was the next big thing we needed to take care of. I facilitated the discussion of the top 10 ideas down to three and then to the one we picked. It worked out really well, suprisingly, all the founders were pretty excited for the same idea.”

In an interview with the Boulder County Business Report, he further says they started with 50 ideas:

“On Friday night we got together at 6, and we went from 50 ideas down to 10. We discussed the 10 on Friday night, and we got down to three,” Hyde said. “We really got into those three ideas, and this was the one that everyone kept talking about.” – from Startup Weekend creates VoSnap

The model fails to deliver. More recently, for the NYC weekend there was further dissension with the way things progressed on the opening night of the effort.

Once again, we differ in our planned approach. First of all, in Birmingham we’re looking to create a BUSINESS. Isn’t that what a ’startup’ is supposed to be? It seems that the tech industry at large is smelling the fumes of Web 2.0 and believing that every Internet-based product *idea* equates to a *business*. That’s why we have dedicated an entire weekend to the business preparation. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up with more than another copycat product or Facebook app.

We still, however, will retain StartupWeekend’s democratic (majority wins) aspect to picking THE project. Nothing wrong there.