Last weekend, I heard about an event called a startup weekend. Tonight, I'm in the middle of one.
The idea is that a bunch of people who are interested in startups get together on a Friday evening after work. Those of us who had them pitched ideas (no one warned me about that part) to the crowd. Then the crowd spent half an hour networking, schoozing, and deciding which ideas were best.
Then we spent another half hour or so picking out teams. Then we had a little time to start fleshing out ideas before they kicked us out for the night.
Our team headed over to a coffee shop to get our plan solid enough to be worth sleeping on. We finished up around midnight, then were back to work around 9 am.
We've had a few speakers--people like IP lawyers, investment brokers, and government agencies whose sole purpose is to help small businesses. But mostly, it's been churning out code and cranking out graphics.
Sunday evening, we pitch to investors.
I dropped by here to look some things up, and I figured I'd at least take enough of a break to mention it.
If you get a chance to go to one, and you're even vaguely interested in starting your own business, I highly recommend finding one. So far, it's a great experience, even though I'm exhausted, sore from spending so much time at my keyboard (it's hard to justify taking breaks when no one else is), and constipated. I've met a lot of interesting people, made some great networking connections, and I've had a chance to work with a lot of very intelligent, creative, dedicated people. Quite a few of them even have personalities.
If nothing else, it's an eye-opener about just how vanilla corporate IT is.
Enough of this. Back to work.