DC Startup Weekend
I spent last weekend at the DC Startup Weekend, and it was a really great experience. The concept is that designers, strategists, and developers in a city get together and get an alpha/beta version of a web 2.0 product live by the end of the weekend, in 54 hours or less, when the project is not even selected until the weekend starts. The startup weekend concept is the brainchild of Andrew Hyde, a young entrepreneur with a big vision.
It’s impressive that a large (50+) group of people can quickly find a way to work together when a lot of them are initially strangers, and all of them have the type of intellectual competitive firepower that comes from being so good at what they do. The accomplishments in the short time frame are equally impressive.
But what strikes me as the most interesting aspect of the weekend is that the work was happening simultaneously on all fronts (marketing, design, business plan, development, coding, etc.) when all logic would dictate that many of these processes should be staged sequentially. A lot of the credit for making it work probably belongs to Matthew Vanden Boogart who led the development team, with the task of trying to program the project even while it was not yet designed.
I think that this is the people equivalent of computational distributed processing. I remember how the advent of distributed processing had a dramatic effect on the types of products I could create – I was creating products for the financial markets at the time, where all the processing had to be achievable in the time between when the stock market closed one day and opened the next morning – and the increased speed of distributed processing allowed all kinds of creative things to be done that were not achievable before. Maybe the type of people-distributed processing in the Startup Weekend model can also lead to similar breakthroughs in creativity and efficiency.