Startup Weekend
Over the weekend, I attended #aklsw, aka Auckland Startup Weekend; it’s one of these hyper-compressed bootcamp weekend events that are growing and multiplying around the world, this one dedicated to the art of, well, startup businesses.
So, in 54 hours, you go, get a minute of floor time to pitch to a room full of other people who came in order to form a team, to then rapidly step through a process of validating and executing a typically technical potentially profitable idea, and then trial it by fire as a five minute presentation before being grilled for ten minutes by some experienced entrepreneurs as judges; there’s an element of competition in that, but the true gains of the weekend come from it not being a cut-throat deal, but a more relaxed, jovial and social environment as well.
I’m going to start gushing some “trite-hype” now; the sort of fulled with words that “I don’t like buzzwords, but..” could be appended to the front of them if you’re skepticism levels are spiking through the roof, but something I’ve now seen twice and found good data to back up my sample size of 2 events and surface contact with a cohort group of around 140-150 (that’s the statistican in me speaking).
The key of Startup Weekend is providing a compressed space of time, energy and contact. It hits a sweet spot where your consciousness can expand to it’s maximum capacity to be constantly taking in and working on your greatest level. There’s deep contact with your team, on-hand contact with mentors who are involved in a similiar, but slightly different gaming event of coaching, and surface contact with a cohort group hovering around the threshold where you can know and interact with everyone. (at least at our events in New Zealand - an event of about 200+ would be higher than that), it’s getting back to those primal small self-selected tribal gatherings; and with a focus on social and economic trading ramped up for the modern world.
The mechanism for the key, the wound spring, if you will, is the rapid feedback loop provided by a space like that. In our paradoxically glacial yet rapid pace of everyday life, actions are immediate, but consequences are always delayed, often divorced completely in terms of causation from our actions, if we can even prescribe them to our own actions and not those of some other force. This is deeply unsatisfying to us as people, and can lead to falls and stumbles in any productive endeavour; our aim on constantly moving targets that are dragged far from us is much worse than a target moving in the same frame of reference, the same place, as we are.
And by pulling the targets closer, compressing the time, Startup Weekend lets us sight our hits and misses in real time; that rush we don’t get to have. And by seeing a hit or miss, you can adjust; and each adjustment builds upon the last. Like calculus teaches us of curves being compromised of a series of ever increasing in slope straight lines, so mught we do with ourselves. I’ve got a diagrammatical thought here I’d like to expand at another time, since I’m drifting off target; explaining what is unlocked.
And what is unlocked, well, a font of humanity.
I’m sure I could phrase that better, but I’d get stuck and bogged down on the idea; that’s the insidious thing about brilliant ideas - they entrench and dig into you; as they do they grow, and as an idea grows while not being executed, it becomes something fleeting, continuously in the glorious future that awaits us if, when. You become a butterfly catcher casting a net at loaming shadows on a wall cast by something so small and dextrous it can evade and slip through the chains of your thought you are wrapping around it; yet look so monstrous and large as we cannot pinpoint that initial seed anymore in the mass we have created, and we lose it.
What you can do when you’re feeding back on yourself though, is grow your own Athena. Yeah, I’m going to dip into Greek mythology to get a fable like metaphor for this.
So, Athena is the goddess of cunning and wisdom. She sprouted fully formed from Zeus’s head, replete with her Gradius and Aegis Shield (a shield with the engraved image of a Gorgon, ie, Medusa; a strong defense that stuns and shocks). We cannot often sprout fully formed functional ideas that can defend themselves; we mere humans are left with mewling embroynic ideas into the world with naraway a defensive skill of their own, so we must shield them and take the attacks personally.
If we can find a space in which to raise, and train our idea, in which we can get that infinite zenith of feedback looping, we can go from zero to hero in what will be remembered as a instant due to the compression. We will attain the feeling and elation of divine creation.
I have to use Greek mythology, because our mythology has no analogue. The divinity is clearly divorced from us, we are forgiven by it.
But to bring an idea to the form of warrior-defender with cunning and wisdom, in a space that we as mere mortals can comprehend; It’s like some form of magic.
Of course, it isn’t Magic. It’s smoke and mirrors in the cortex; a cunning and wise game that we crave and are addicted to.
It’s just a weekend, in a room, with people, with a commonality and a shared purpose. It’s just what we’re made for.