An amazing Startup Weekend

Recently I had a chance to attend the startup weekend hosted at Google Zurich! To those who don't know about it yet, it's an intense 54 hours event where developers, designers, investors and all kinds of dreamers come together to share ideas, build products, forge teams and launch great startups. (Check it out yourself at up.co) What an amazing experience it was! And to sweeten it further, our team won the prize for the best pitch.

Thanks to the wonderful effort of organizers, this event changed my way of thinking about how startups and even large organization could work. Here are the key take away:-

Startups are all about solving problems

Often engineers end up getting too thrilled and deep into Technology. Our love of technology sometimes dilutes our vision to see the overall picture, which is problem solving and value creation. This event allowed me to focus more towards the problem solving part rather than finding and using the latest and coolest tech, most efficient algorithms, software and solution. It allowed me to realize that customers are paying for the value startup is creating rather than the technology it is using. There is no doubt that a great technology would make a great product, but the primary focus should be kept on the end product rather than the means to it. This means that if the technology you love is not proving to suitable for the achieving the end goal, you should be able to throw it away and use what serves best for the purpose.

Infect others with your idea and passion!

Each presenter had exactly one minute to pitch idea to a large audience and then recruit interested engineers, designers and business professionals to collaborate with you in an open hall. The scenario looked exactly like a Bazaar where people were Hawking, poaching and standing on tables to find or to be found. While almost every presenter was absolutely thrilled with his / her own idea, the litmus test was to convince other people about your idea and make them as excited as you are about it. In simpler words, you need to infect others with your idea and make them believe in it as much as you do. This required not only great presentation skills but also ability to demonstrate clear vision, leadership and competence to deliver the results. It turned out people believed more in leaders than in the idea itself. Also they saw clear benefits following someone with great passion who could produce great results.

Prototype early and get feedback

Many of the team built quick prototypes, and found the alpha and beta customers in cafeteria, lunch tables to get a quick feedback. Most common questions asked were: -"Do you think this is a real problem" and "Would you pay someone to solve it". The ability to get a quick feedback allowed us to alter our course of action and adjust it to find the sweet spot where our startup could create tangible value. In our case, we took a complete U-turn and ended up creating something altogether different than what we initially started up with. To give some idea, we started with building add on to game streaming service Twitch and ended up creating a meta search engine for tutorials. In the end, one of the judge agreed that finding right tutorial was indeed a problem he was facing :-)

Thinking from First Principals vs Analogy

This is a quote from my favorite Elon Musk where he talks about thinking in terms of fundamental vs thinking in terms of analogy. Thinking fundamentally is what Elon Musk does at his best:- reusing rocket engines, building electric cars from scratch. There were many such ideas like that in the event as well. While this approach is very innovative and exciting yet it requires lot of effort and energy to eventually materialize. On the other side, there were ideas who were trying to bring a very successful concept to a completely different field. For example, the winner of the event made an app Wyder which was called Tinder for Art! By capitalizing the popularity of Tinder, their idea was quickly absorbed by anyone who knew Tinder.

Kill it Fast, Kill it cheap

This was a hard learnt lesson! If any point of time we felt that this idea is no longer sustainable and can not be carried forward, we have to kill it immediately by our own hands and move forward. Often people keep on dragging their feets with an already dead concept because there was too much at stake as well as personal ego and proud attached to build it. Killing something which doesn't work not only saves money, it also saves lot of cost in terms of opportunity because then there are higher chances to do something which really works!

Overall, it was one of the best weekend I spent last year meeting with amazing people. If you find it interesting too, check out the next event around you and have fun!