Startup Weekend Restarts in D.C.

The goal: Create a new company in three days or less.

By Bob Keefe | August 13, 2010

What happens when you take a group of 60 techies, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and others and lock them in the room together for the weekend?

Smelly socks and empty pizza boxes aside, if the folks behind Startup Weekend D.C. are right, you'll get a new tech company. Or several.

Beginning Friday night at Touchstone Consulting Group in D.C.'s Dupont Circle, they'll find out if they were right. After a three-year hiatus from Washington, a group of like-minded local techies are restarting Startup Weekend D.C.

"There's been a lot of change in the local tech community in Washington D.C.," over the past several years, said organizer Stephen Douglass. "There's been a huge entrepreneurial movement here now," he said. "People are starting things in DC and that (trend) is just really growing."

Just like Startup Weekends.

The first of the tech fests was held in the other Washington - in Seattle - in 2007 when several local techies decided they missed the feel and flavor of a collaborating on a startup venture. They challenged themselves to create a new company in three days.

What they ultimately created was the Startup Weekend franchise. Over the past three years, local Startup Weekends have been held around the globe, from Rogers, Arkansas to Tel Aviv, Israel.

The format is all the same and - as with most startup companies - the agenda is fluid.

On the first night, participants pitch ideas to each other and decide on what they want to create. Over the next two days, they'll collaborate to write code, create marketing plans, design Web sites and do whatever else they need to do. During sporadic breaks, they'll dine together and listen in to panel discussions by local VCs, attorneys and others and learn about what it takes to get a startup off the ground. A $75 ticket includes meals and admission to all events.

"But instead of just some networking event where you go and shake someone's hand … you end up rolling up your sleeves and going to work with people you never knew before," Douglass said.

Since that first Seattle Startup weekend, more than 500 new companies have been hatched at similar events around the globe. None have become the next Microsoft Corp. or Google Inc. yet - but they've included some interesting ideas.

At a Startup Weekend in San Francisco, for instance, participants came up with Foodspotting.com, a site that lets users find, comment and upload pictures of particular - or peculiar - dishes at restaurants around the world. An investor at that event pledged $5,000 on the spot to start that venture.

Then there's Escapemydate.com. Send a direct Twitter message to the site and it will automatically contact a list of your friends who can call and bail you out of an awkward situation. If no friends are around to give you a call, the site will send you an automated cell call feigning an emergency.

Other Startup Weekend companies include event sharing sites, online journals for pregnant women, and games like Assassin, in which smart phone users can find and "assassinate" other players using GPS-enabled smart phones.

Douglass was a participant at the last Startup Weekend in D.C. He and others created a social networking site for apartment residents called holaneighbor.com.

The founders of holaneighbor.com quickly learned another lesson about startups, however: Getting started is just the start. Not long after they launched the site, they said adios to holaneighbor.com. The site is now defunct.

"I think it just sort of lost momentum," he said.

For more on this weekend's activities, visit http://dc.startupweekend.org/.

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