StartupWeekend in Montréal?

By Heri Jul 28th 2007 in Business, entrepreneurship

Apparently, many found the original startupweekend at Boulder, Colorado was a hit, as many attendees though it was a great learning experience, although the delivery and development failed brutally. Hosted by David Crow, Toronto will now be staging a startupweekend this mid-september, with over 100 people working intensily during the weekend to create a startup from scratch.

I have met some people here in Montréal who said the current event lineup was more than enough, but I think the question has to be asked and discussed. Do you think a Montreal StartupWeekend would be useful for Montréal?

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Comments

David Crow July 28, 2007

Hi Heri,

Not hosted by me, hosted by another set of Toronto folks at the Innovation Toronto facility.

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Marc Chriqui July 28, 2007

Most things with the words “startup” and “Montreal” are worth it.

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Francis Wu July 28, 2007

I’d personally like to see something like that in MTL and even contribute to such an event However, the success of such an event depends largely on what we can learn from the Colorado experiment.

One thing David Crow doesn’t really mention in his last post was the logistics of managing 70 people. Is it just me, or is 70 people simply asking for trouble? To put things in perspective, Cork’d was created from A to Z by only two guys.

I reckon that for a Startup Weekend to be succesful, the team must be smaller — I know, cherry-picking a team may defeat the whole “community” thing — and someone has to manage the project. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up with something more akin to a geeky love-in instead of serious project.

Hope that wasn’t too ranty :P.

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Heri July 29, 2007

Francis Wu: if you look at the objectives (create a working startup in 1 weekend), the Boulder event failed. The group was too big, some people became team leaders even though there were more experimented people in the room, Java was chosen as the technology, but there was no clear reason why.

so I think your comment nails where the problem is. I asked the question because the initiative is growing in many cities, much alike barcamps and democamps and I thought maybe Montréal is missing something.

if there is to be an event like this, i think there should be multiple teams, each having a project. make it fun, make them compete, don’t set expectations too high, and it should be much more interesting.

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Francis Wu July 29, 2007

Heri, I think that’s a brilliant idea — several projects instead of just one. Might be a win-win solution to resolve a number of issues, especially the whole “too many cooks” scenario. So if anyone’s organizing one, be it in MTL or elsewhere, bear that in mind :P!

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Francis Wu July 29, 2007

Heri, but to answer your question, I think MTL can use an event like this, but all in due time — IMHO, there’s probably more we can learn from other events first.

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Sylvain Carle July 30, 2007

Or how about different team on the same project, with something like three “rounds” where everyone presents where they are after each one? A friendly competition?

But I still think that the idea behind mashpits/beercamps are better, work on an existing project that could use a hand (or several projects if you have that many participants.

See http://mashpit.pbwiki.com/MashPitMontreal and http://www.afroginthevalley.com/2007/03/01/mashpit-montreal-now.html for more info…

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Heri July 30, 2007

sylvain and francis: it’s probably better then to watch the Toronto experiment and see how they are doing this. I also thought today that there might not be enough people to make an event.

until then lets do democamps, barcamps, breakfasts, web dev book clubs, and mashpits (although I dont see any upcoming mashpits in montreal?)

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