New blank sheets went up. Keeron Thandroyen from Greenville, S. He had given the idea some thought. He had outsourced some preliminary coding to a guy in Eastern Europe. And he had Photoshopped mockups of some website pages. Startup Weekend Charlotte is the local version of a series of intense learning opportunities created by the Startup Weekend group. The umbrella organization has received support from the Kauffman Foundation, and it partners with businesses, particularly those interested in technology.
Similar programs have cropped up for groups like nonprofits. It became a meme in our tight-knit group. Did you say revenue again? Our team was a bit like the island of misfit toys, gathered together in an awkward process Friday evening after people made their initial pitches of ideas in 90 seconds each. Coders and developers found teams first in this sorting process that resembled the picking of sandlot baseball teams. Designers came second. Marketers and social media people came after.
Participants showed their skills through a colored dot on their name tags. Our team members included: Clinton Taylor: Clinton pitched the idea of MyLinkedOut on Friday night and initially gathered the group together. He graduated from Mars Hill College and tried a few months as a physical education teacher, then moved into jobs that let him work with his hands.
He now works as a wireless technician for Dnet Internet Services, the Internet service provider for Franklin. Judy Chapman: Judy rode over from Franklin with Clinton. Her management and business skills became apparent in the team early on; she kept people on track, organized strategies and became the project manager. I failed somehow to get his last name. Coding specialties varied widely, with Ruby specialists, dot net specialists and others. Like most coders, ours had to deal with the frustration of waiting to work until the group solidified specifications.
But like most teams, we benefited from his presence in the room, bringing us back to earth and bringing insights into why systems thinking is important. The Coder also started the revenue meme on Saturday. By early Sunday, he only had to look with a raised eyebrow to indicate that the revenue question remained to be solved. I contributed some ideas and effort in social media to the group and shared some ideas learned during an intensive weeklong boot camp for news entrepreneurs in early at the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California.
For this team, I was the only local resident, so I added local knowledge. Beyond that, I was the one who dragged in on Saturday and Sunday about noon, after others showed up at 8 a. Keeron Thandroyen: Key, for short, brought the excitement and energy. It was his idea for Just Collab that the group adopted early Saturday.
Key had a few working pages on a website coded by his Eastern European contact. He had enough Photoshop skills to serve as our designer for wire framing and for providing quick logos. He brought intensity and emotion and quick thinking to the group, with ideas firing in all directions.
This is a great event for working on a project for the fun of it, and making friends and connections in the Charlotte startup community at the same time. We have a lot of sponsors, judges, advisors and volunteers to introduce, but we need attendees! If you cannot afford the registration fees, please contact me, as there may be some scholarship possibilities. You can view the archives or sign up! For those of you who are learning of my existence for the first time, welcome! I came to Charlotte in January of to pursue my professional passion of working with Ruby on Rails.
I selected a Charlotte startup over one in the Bay Area because I believed in the business. During our time here, my wife and I have come to love Charlotte deeply, and have made it our home. I am co-organizing Charlotte Startup Weekend 2. The agenda is available on the CSW2 website , but here is a summary. Work will begin. Food and drink will be provided. Advisors will review and offer commentary on your progress.
At the end of the weekend, a panel of judges will decide who has won. Depending on the organizers meeting their sponsorship goals, there may be prizes awarded the winners. Perhaps our winner will have an opportunity to become tenants at our host sponsor, Packard Place! The primary sponsor of the Startup Weekend brand is the Kauffman Foundation , whose mission is promoting entrepreneurship. A study from that group in begins When it comes to U.
The study reveals that, both on average and for all but seven years between and , existing firms are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year. By contrast, in their first year, new firms add an average of 3 million jobs. Practicing will make us better, and you could meet your next business partner at this event.
So, go register! And if you are interested in sponsorship, please contact me at jim at jimvanfleet. What happened was that Jesse did not want to let out a piece of software because he knew, for sure, that it would bring the site down.
The VP overrode him by saying that the site may go down, but the stock price will go up. So, the software went out, and it brought the site down. Two days of firefighting and the site came back up, and so did the stock price, and so did the volume of orders. The dev team went on and had a party, they were rewarded for job well done, new and profitable functionality released.
At the end of the year, Ops got penalized for the outage! Amazon rewarded development for releasing software and providing value and operations was not a part of that. They were in fact penalized for something that was out of their control. We can describe them roughly as creative programmers, mathematicians, and bureaucrats. To excerpt from this post does it a great disservice, and, like most other things I post to my blog, is highly recommended reading.
From my time in undergraduate CS studies at a prestigious university attached to the programming languages team, for good measure!
I worked on a team working on an optimizing compiler for the Java language that could detect when known transforms could be applied yielding a semantically equivalent, but faster, set of bytecodes. The platform gets marginally faster for everyone, should the research yield meaningful fruit and get adopted upstream. A noble goal, undertaken by earnest and intelligent men and women, but ultimately doomed. One note the author does not strike is of the commercial nature of programming languages.
Over and over, we see the pattern: evangelism, adoption, glut of choice, everything starts to suck and get vendor dependent, death. Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, etc. This fact should not be lost on the judgement of quality of CS research. On the other side of the equation, programming an IDE that supported an alternative implementation of the generics which became part of the Java language in JDK 1. Pair programming, test driven development, The Pragmatic Programmer, etc.
Thanks, Dr. There is nothing more energizing than getting together in a large room of people that want to start and build a business, even more so to do it in a weekend!
Friday evening people come together and pitch business ideas. The entire crowd votes for the best few ideas, and then everyone breaks into teams around the business ideas they want to take part in. That night they get organized and over the course of late Friday evening, all day Saturday and Sunday, they build the business, the software, the apps the whatever, and try to have everything live in order to demonstrate it to the judges Sunday evening.
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