A fascinating sociological experiment is going on this weekend in Boulder called Startup Weekend. Several people in the local tech / entrepreneural scene including Andrew Hyde, David Cohen, Kevin Cawley, Danny Newman, Joe Scharf, and Alex King decided to get a bunch of people in a room for a weekend and see if a company could come out of it. Whatever comes out of the weekend will be up for grabs for someone to run with it.
There are about 60 people here right now and David Cohen is liveblogging things. Out of the gate there are a couple of vectors that are really interesting, including the getting to know each other dynamic, figuring out the idea, working through how to discuss stuff, self-organizing the various groups of people, and figuring out who should do what within each group (e.g. of developers, designers, PR people, user experience, legal, and the VCs that can’t really do anything productive except sponsor the meals.)
We are about two hours in and the idea has been chosen. The energy dynamic has shifted dramatically in the past hour – from a situation where people where clearly trying to figure out how to interact to a steady buzz as people are now digging in to figure out how to approach the problem.
Who knows what is going to come out of this, but it’s more interesting than going to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3.