Last night I attended a planning session for the next Seattle Startup Weekend event, and yes, I can report that Startup Weekend is coming back to Seattle. 

This is great news for the Seattle startup community, as the first two Seattle Startup Weekend events – plus the one in Redmond last August – were great community-building exercises and brought together people who still maintain close connections in the local tech community.

The tentative date is March 19-21 2010, and the tentative host is Amazon (described as “99% certain” by one of the organizers – Clint, I think).  Last night at Cyclops about 15 people showed up, and although the agenda was more of an informal “drink beer and chat” style event than I had originally envisioned, it was still nice to meet others who are as jazzed about Startup Weekend as I am. Among other things, it was great to make the acquaintance of Franck Nouyrigat (@peignoir), a local organizer of Paris Startup Weekend, who is a prolific world traveler among other things – check out his Picasa albums.

On a personal note, it was really nice to see @aviel and @geekcoach again, whom I met for the first time in January 2008 at the first Seattle Startup Weekend.   Relationships I developed at that event two years ago still continue strong.

IMG_3781.JPG. (h/t Andrew Hyde)

I’m the handsome one in the blue shirt!

I would have liveblogged Day 2 of the Seattle Startup Weekend event like I did Day 1, but I was so busy the whole day that it proved impossible. Even scratching my butt would have required taking my hands off the keyboard (Ed: you use two hands? Sometimes.). But I haven’t had more fun during a 14-hour workday for a long long time.

So, first things first: our assembled rock stars collectively chose a name for our new startup, and it is:

*REDACTED*

Ha ha! You didn’t think I’d spill the beans here, do you? There are all sorts of market-penetrating, first-mover, Secret Squirrel reasons why I’m not revealing the name right now. Our marketing and PR folks are busy at work crafting a Steve-Jobs-worthy product rollout strategy. I think it will be something like those “I’m a Mac” commercials, only it will be “I’m a *REDACTED*“. Ha ha! You almost got me to reveal the name again!

So, on to the day. As a developer, I first have to critique the food selection, and it was awesome. Bagels, fruit and cheese for breakfast; subs for lunch; and burritos/nachos for dinner. Thanks to the fine human beings at Jott, Madrona Venture Group, and LockerGnome for their participation. Oh, and someone brought cake. I think that was one of the people from the marketing team. Yay.

Next: the propeller-heads in the room had settled the night before on Python/Django, so the morning was spent getting environments set up, ramping up on syntax, etc. I’ve been working with compiled languages my whole life, so Python looks odd — it’s sort of like when you go into a museum and see a cat skeleton — if you look hard enough, you can see what it is supposed to be, but it still makes you shudder and toss salt over your left shoulder. Nevertheless, mad props to the three Django guys who spent the whole day acting as roving professors — I overheard some of their conversations and they are awesomely critical to the success of the weekend. Great job!

I volunteered to be QA since (a) I love testing and (b) I don’t know Python. So I (drum roll please)…learned Ruby! Ruby’s another one of these interpreted OO languages, only it performs worse than Python and has a fragmented community. So it’s perfect. I ramped up on Watir, which one of my QA guys had turned me on to about 15 months ago, and it was fairly easy to get going. Luckily another dev at SSW named Craig has been around for me to ask questions about Ruby. Watir is not exactly NUnit and TestDriven.NET on Visual Studio, but it’s pretty neat nonetheless, and I really feel like I’m learning something.

I also did the domain-name acquisition. GoDaddy.com is really a terrible-looking website, but at least it’s not Network Solutions.

The UX team (Cassie, Bob, Adam, Jocelyn, a couple others whose names I didn’t know) did an AWESOME job of putting together a functional diagram for our website, with help from Matt on our team. Everyone loved the specs, especially the developers, who now know what they are supposed to break.

Off on the other side of the room, we got updates from business development, design, and other groups periodically throughout the day. There’s apparently such a thing as a “doorstep pitch”, which is like yesterday’s “elevator pitch”, only you have like three seconds to impress the person before their eyes glaze over and their mind goes off to relive last night’s Celebrity Apprentice. Also, we have a logo, and it rocks! It’s really amazing what a group of talented, motivated people can do when they need to. That’s the main lesson I’m taking away from this weekend.

In the afternoon, Scott Andrew performed some music for the group. He’s really talented. Nice set, and thanks for coming, Scott!

I feel pretty good. The atmosphere is still friendly, productive, and nobody has gone postal (yet!). There’s a fun guy named Sam who cusses like he was raised in an Dublin brothel, but he’s got a great attitude and appears to be the type of person who is so talented he could flash EEPROMs during breaks, using only an Apple Newton and some paper clips. I also think our dev lead, Scott, is doing a great job, with backup from Mike. Both are SW veterans, I think.

Day 3 starts here in an hour or so. I’m getting caffeinated for today’s 12-hour mad rush to the finish line. Should be awesome!

Seattle Startup Weekend has … erm… started up!

[6:04] Things kicked off just past 6 PM with a short statement by Andrew Hyde, followed by a few minutes waiting for latecomers.

[6:30] We got going for real, with a mercifully short PowerPoint about the background of the SW concept, tips for the weekend, then we started generating ideas! We’ve been thinking through tons of ideas and batting them back and forth, then pitching them to related tables.

[7:24] Andrew is about to go through the favorite ideas so far. A couple more minutes to pitch ideas.

[7:38] Top ideas so far:

1. Reality show fantasy league – fun and could Facebook it!
2. Social mapping service – find local events by tag/keyword.
3. Match.com for enterprises. Hard to find people in the enterprise who have certain capabilities.
4. Mobile drinking platform: share your drinking games with your friends via mobile
5. Freelance blacklist

[7:54] A few more ideas:

1. RideShare/RideMatch. Nobody does rideshares very well.
2. Wiki/Contact List. Is this like Plaxo?
3. Redate. Search for people stood up on dates?
4. Facebook widget soliciting donations for birthday presents.
5. Frequent Flyer number website. Prefills out new FF memberships.

Andrew has a hunch the winner might come from the first four or five ideas already presented.

[8:12] Now we’re debating the winner. I like the reality fantasy league idea — lots of eyeballs. Our table might be leaning toward the mobile drinking game.

[8:26] Top 4:

1. Match.com for Enterprise
2. Freelancers Network / Blacklist
3. Rideshare.
4. Greenshare: Pay donations to encourage green behavior. This is Andrew Hyde’s idea that he says he’s pitched unsuccessfully 13 times.

WTF. Alright, time to figure out which of these I could get behind. One guy raises his hand and says anything with “enterprise” probably couldn’t be done in a weekend. Good point. Andrew says 15 minutes more max to reach a decision.

Lots of Q&A about Match.com for Enterprise idea. There’s a sense of unease about the scope of the idea, even though people get the gist of it and like it. More concern about the Freelancer idea – liability, slander, probability that contributors will get blacklisted as “cranky freelancers.” Next a pitch for Rideshare. One guy makes the point that the Seattle Startup Weekend might want to go for an idea that represents Seattle values. Nice call.

[8:47] Acceptance voting time.

Rideshare takes the bulk of the votes. This was my vote too. YAY.

Next: the actual work. Usability and product managers are going to get together and define what we’re making. Introduce constraints, to indicate what we ARE making and what we are NOT making. There’s a minor quibble over whether the bizdev people and marketing people should be included in the product management. Andrew says no. He’s probably right, as you could end up with a diluted vision.

[8:57] The groups split up – devs, UX, bizdev, etc. There are 37 of us in the propeller-head corner. An outgoing guy named Scott takes charge. We take a mini-pool about who absolutely doesn’t want to do front-end, back-end, etc. Good question about who is going to QA. QA in a weekend project? HERESY. Besides, isn’t that what we slap a little “beta” tagline under our logo for? (I jest). Then a little survey about the level of experience people have. Most people are in the 5-to-10 year range.

Good idea to delay technology discussion for a bit. Flame war potential has just been reduced a LOT. Get any group of devs together, however, and you’ll have religious wars.

[9:16] The whiteboarding begins. Whiteboards are to developer meetings what barkers are to carnivals — everybody gravitates and gapes. Front-end people: Scott, Myk, Dave. Back-end people: no names, but some votes for Ruby, Python, .NET, SQL Server.

[9:21] Good question: what about hosting? There’s apparently a systems / IT group around here somewhere, but nobody can seem to find them (yet). Some gracious soul just volunteered a server.

[9:26] Voting starts to take place for technologies. .NET got killed because we’re hosting on Linux systems. Bummer. Then the “hate vote” comes in, asking “who has a visceral hatred of technology X” — not too many votes for anybody, except Java.  Hello Seattle!

[9:54] Looks like the dev group is gravitating toward PHP/Python/Ruby for backend code (really middle-tier code).

[10:05] Uh oh.  There’s a big possible change in the works: the rideshare idea looks competitive and possibly unpromising to a new startup.  We’re discussing now.

[10:20] A straw vote of the attendees found about 50% of the crowd wanted to change the idea based on the competitive analysis. More discussion until 10:30.

[10:26] Basecamp login: https://startupweekend.grouphub.com/login. Unfortunately we don’t have accounts yet. Hm. The dev group sent around SVN username signup sheets, so I downloaded and installed TortoiseSVN. It’s a pretty easy client. The IRC hangout is freenode #sws. The Chatzilla plugin for Mozilla browsers is fine for this one.

[10:28] About a third of crowd has filed out thus far. 9:00 AM seems like it’s only a short time away!

[10:30] A couple replacement ideas:

1. Fantasy Reality League (yay!) Pro: lots of traffic. Cons: Legal issues. Women/Men divide? What’s the revenue model?
2. Match.com for Enterprise: Pro: huge need? Con: competing enterprise KM systems? Enormous companies doing the same thing at many levels?

The vote went overwhelmingly in favor of the Match.com for Enterprise. We’ll get started bright and early tomorrow.

The official Seattle Startup Weekend blog notes that they are sold out.  Not sure exactly when this happened, but it must have been before January 10th based on a comment from a would-be attendee.  It would be nice to have that date, just out of curiousity.  The bbgm blog thinks there will be 120 people there, but I remember early on seeing that attendance would be capped at a lower number.  We’ll see — the more the merrier, I guess.

I’m getting excited!