A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

Where to start? So many different impressions of just one weekend. Many interesting persons, a great location and a lot of ups and downs. Conclusion first, it was amazing, a tremendous experience and I am glad that I’ve been able to take part in such an experiment of creating a business within 48 hours. We created Edelbild (German for precious picture), a web-based service that connects customers who wants to beautify their digital images with image experts, who can sign up and process certain orders.

“Startup Weekend is an idea, an experiment, a chance to gather the tech community and create a company over one jam packed weekend” (from StartupWeekend New York). In Germany the Startup Weekend was not tech-oriented and from the developer, to the consultant to the lawyer, everyone took part. This makes it more exciting but also more problematic with regards to the whole coordination and the common goals. A developer wants to see a running version and a fast launch, business oriented people have been happy with a complete business plan, for example. We had around 14 developers with very different skill sets and technology focuses. In total we have been over 120 persons who are now shareholders.

Everyone would say it is not possible to start a REAL business in under 48 hours but with some more work we accomplished what we wanted. The company is now an official Limited registered in England & Wales. In Germany it would not have been so easy and fast to create one, luckily there are some improvements in the near future.

So, what are the limiting factors or the bottlenecks of the whole plan? I guess it should be obvious that this is the development. It is an IT company that has to create a web-based platform to provide its services. No one suggested brick-and-mortar businesses in the 13 elevator pitches and only a few really cared about the feasibility of the implementation in such a short time. How can you develop a software product that should be ready for production use in 2 days? Developing software lasts a while and is a complicated process. We could not figure out which technology to use until the early morning of the Sunday.
Now just considering development aspects: I started developing with Ruby and the Rails web framework because it was the fastest way I could imagine. We did not see the possibility to extend existing software that provides most of the needed functionality, which often also takes a long time and creates pure frustration. Having chosen the technology and being able to split up the work, the Sunday became very productive and we made good progress. We finalized the design, set up the server, tested the deployment methods, worked on the main HTML templates, implemented a big part of the functionality, evaluated payment methods and much more. The system administration was exemplary, so everyone could rely on the heavily used issue tracking system and the source code repository. What a difference, on day one, we have been totally disorganized and we had problems with the wireless internet connection, problems to find a place to get some work done and the missing development power. Day two, highly productive, we developed major parts for a first release and the atmosphere was great, energetic and supportive. Two more full-time Rails developers joined the development team. It would have been disappointing if the Saturday has been equal to the Sunday. This situation has been faced in nearly all teams.

Long story short, now the weekend is over and to make the company succeed and the web application launch, developers are needed to work maybe full-time on this project for a short time. This requires money that we don’t have and the developer team just can support the whole process but no one has the time to work on it long hours because of other projects and regular work. If the new voted Director can manage this tasks and if he finds a solution to this problem the company can proceed which would be great to make the accomplishments of the weekend even more exciting.

Despite that, one of the goals was to connect interesting persons and to build a community which was definitely the case. I met many with similar interests in startup culture and technology and I am looking forward to meet them again for some other occasions or a startup weekend reunion.

The end of the weekend was a little bit too abrupt, so we just voted the directory and secretary but did not summarize the work that has been done. Hopefully I get some information in the next days, I definitely want see the business plan for example.

If you read this and you took part in another StartupWeekend please share some comments and comparisons.

Thanks to the organizers who put a lot of work into this event.

Cornelius.

Having lived in Waterloo on my exchange year at the University of Waterloo, I have to say some comments to this place. Nearly no one knows it in Germany, of course, the world is big and Waterloo has just 110.000 citizens, so nothing special. Mannheim is in Germany on rank 20 with around 300.000 citizens and not this exciting from a technology / entrepreneurship perspective.

Now some facts:

• Waterloo, part of the TechTriangle, was voted the World’s Top Intelligent Community in 2007.
• In the overall top ten of North Americas Small Cities of the Future
• A top-notch technical university with one of the biggest math / computer science departments in the world.

“With more than 5,300 students, 200 full-time professors, and 180 courses in mathematics, statistics and computer science, the faculty is a powerhouse of discovery and innovation.”

• Research in Motion, the company that produces the well-known Blackberry was founded in Waterloo, next to many other technology oriented international businesses.
• Latest news from September 19th 2007: “UW Research+Tech Park announces two new buildings; Google moves into TechTown” Google is growing and growing and they know where the talent is.

You will always hear the words talent, collaboration, community, entrepreneurship and technology in combination with Waterloo. These are success indicators if done right.

Not convinced yet, watch the high quality promotion video of Waterloo, or the version below.

P.S.
Still, if you are driving into Waterloo you would never expect such an exceptional place. German cities have the better infrastructure and liveliness, especially the city centers. Waterloo looks like a small village and has to do some work on this part.

Feel free to add other interesting aspects in the comments, this was just a rough cut.

In 7 hours I will go by train to Hamburg to attend the Startup Weekend, the first one in Germany. It will be exciting and I haven’t been in Hamburg for many years, although it is supposed to be such a nice city. It will be my first German tech/web/startup community event, and I love to see how it compares to the Canadian Barcamp/Democamp atmosphere. Oh, there is also the big question if there will be a ready-to-go company after this weekend? All signs are on green, so we will see.

Everyone who wants to follow this event, there will be a live stream at UStream.

I will definitely write a follow up on this event because one goal is to create a viable spreading startup culture in Germany and I have to put my 2 cents to it.