Ann Arbor Startup Weekend, As A Type Of Puzzle Game
Ann Arbor Startup Weekend (SWA2) reminds me of a type of Alternate Reality Game. That's a structure that blurs the line between a game and normal life. Like an Alternate Reality Game, SWA2 provides a tantalizing dramatic narrative (about you, starting a company), gradually revealed through a series of questions that stimulate your curiosity.
- You will not be told the backstory, the explanation, why the organizers created the game. At the opening meeting of SWA2, there were many questions along the lines of "why are the organizers doing this?" A typical starting point to an alternate reality game is the ilovebees website, or Ethan Haas Was Right. SWA2 had Not An Employee. Polished and attractive sites exude mystery, leading you to expect a "call to action", but there is none. It makes you curious to figure out why someone put the site in place. Instead of spoon-feeding you, it encourages you to take charge of your own experience.
- You have to figure out what the goals are. Can a startup be launched in a weekend? Don't give the trivial answer of "yes" based on the fact that startup weekends happen all the time and are considered successful. We can get a more useful answer by defining the question more carefully. What does it mean to finish launching a startup? I suppose every participant had to figure it out for themselves.
- You have to figure out who the players are. Ad-hoc formation of teams to solve a puzzle. Talking to this player, why are they here, what do they bring, and what do they want? Just like in a scavenger hunt, the competition is the team vs. the challenge, not usually players competing against other players.
- You have to figure out the rules for yourself. There is no timetable published in advance. The organizers will surprise the participants by announcing an unexpected transition. I'm not sure this was intentional at SWA2. Or, perhaps they prevented us from planning the best use of our time for some reason which was too clever for me to see. Perhaps it was unintentional and they just forgot to tell us. On Friday, left without structure, we formed our own structures, only to have them suddenly broken. In one example, people were talking and planning, only to be interrupted and lose their train of thought when called together. In that instance we were only called together to tell us to get to work! Work on what? We had been trying to figure that out. Too late. You lose the "game". ;) You don't get voted off the island, but islands will form. Like musical chairs, you need to be on one when they do.
SWA2 provides function space, some food and drinks, paper and pens, nametags, and some swag. This is what is meant by "facilitating". There is no teaching of how to launch a startup. Perhaps more importantly, there is no advice on how to get the most out of a startup weekend.
My advice on how to get the most out of the event is to try to read up in advance to learn how to launch a startup. If you would like to pitch an idea, other participants will look to you to be a leader and provide them with a plan. Try to figure out which skills would be necessary for your product or service and the structure of the organization, so you'll be prepared to look for those people. You will have almost no time to do so, and it is not guaranteed that they will be there.
That's why Friday of SWA2 is crucial. Spending Friday poorly will cause your entire weekend to fail. You must know when to recognize that the skills you need are not available at the event, and jump ship into someone else's startup while you still can.
Seven to eight PM on Friday is dedicated to giving two-minute elevator pitches. There were two people whose weak startup pitches were transparent attempts to get customers, but they were mostly ignored this weekend and were no problem. They served a good purpose in siphoning off the few participants who would fall for their fakery. The other presenters generated considerable excitement. There were about twenty-five pitches in various stages of bakedness. There are about six serious ones left.
and I divided up the elevator pitches for our company (Storybridge) into two projects. She stood up and gave the pitch for a micropayment system to reduce direct reader-to-author transaction fees, called Jade. Jade also allows fans to conveniently and efficiently compensate someone for a story they already read for free on the internet.
The second project in the company's plan is a web service for short fiction that customizes itself to your tastes and introduces you to stories you might like. The first step is the Fiction Genome Project, which identifies hundreds of attributes of a reader's emotional experience -- laughter, fear, sentimentality, puzzle, romance, mythopoeic beauty, intellectual stimulation about the real world, and many subdivisions of these-- and applies these tags to a large collection of samples in a pilot program. The second step is a client web application which uses feedback from each individual reader to gain an uncanny understanding of their tastes and create an online short fiction station designed uniquely for them. I got up and gave a really good pitch for it.
If you consider yourself a literary person, who says "I just want fiction that's sorted into the generically good pile", you're already well-served by human magazine editors. Part of the point of our web service is to capture the market of those who de-prioritize fiction reading. They currently don't read fiction because they're really picky in their tastes and they don't have time to hunt through the glut of generically good stories to find the ones that give them the mix of mental experience they're looking for. It has to be exactly what they want to read, not just generically good. The system tweaks the formula just a little at a time, until it gradually expands the picky reader's tastes as far as they will go.
Eight to nine PM is a socializing time when startup pitches compete with each other to attract the team members necessary to meet meaningful goals. Half an hour into the socializing hour, the organizers revealed that we were only going to have another half-hour to finish this stage! Ready or not.
I spent the weekend at a table with two tiny "teams" which were incomplete, but too dedicated to our own projects to join the other ones. One difference between an ARG and SWA2 is that an ARG wants to keep players involved and SWA2 doesn't mind if the aimless or odd-man-out will "wash out".
Storybridge was already underway long before SWA2, and we met with the micropayment developers for lunch on Friday, but they weren't at SWA2. The two of us have been idly chatting with folks about Storybridge all weekend and writing 's plans on a large piece of butcher paper so that I can understand the micropayment system and how it interacts with the fiction web delivery/recommendation.
The other project at our table was also incredibly exciting to me. Tactile Portraits by David Brennan is going to scan customers with 3D scanners in mall kiosks to create sculptures of customers in 3D printers. We've been sketching logos and designs for the infographics that will go in the Tactile Portraits investment prospectus. Unfortunately I don't have Adobe Creative Suite on this laptop, so I can't do satisfactory work. For me, I hope that participation in this company will be the fulfillment of a longstanding dream of rapid prototyping and 3D models. I spent more time this weekend learning the 3D modeling program Maya than on any other activity (if you don't count spectating other groups to be an activity). Using Maya is like crack, just like I thought it would be. Big thanks to Leo Li for teaching me as he made a 3-D model of David over the weekend. We plan to get together for more training!
Tactile Portraits needed to get a business developer. Storybridge needed a backend database developer. Neither were left over from Friday's musical chairs, so both of the teams I'm involved with are in the position of trying to figure out what we can accomplish this weekend to get the most out of it. Today at 4PM those who are still at the event will present on what their teams accomplished. I'll be interested to see what they decided to aim for and how many of those milestones they met-- Did they seek incorporation? An organization chart? A business plan? A name, URL, and logo? Working code?
Without launching startups, the way to get some benefit from SWA2 is by meeting people. You might think "ugh, a networking group". But no, it was not like those networking breakfasts where salespeople sell to other salespeople, which feels like failed predators desperately preying on each other. I was pleased that SWA2 did not have that creepy vibe. At SWA2 you are expected to have some kind of valuable skill to provide to a project, and that makes all the difference. My summary of the weekend is that ideas are a dime a dozen, but skills are solid gold. If you have a valuable skill, and are looking for an idea to which to apply it, you will find great success here. If you are married to your own idea and are looking for others with skills to help you do it, just be prepared in case that doesn't happen here.
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