Can you Skribit?
By Gary Goettling
Startup Weekend boot camps tech entrepreneurs
What do you get when you bring together more than 100 tech-savvy entrepreneurs and give them just 54 hours to come up with a new business?
In Atlanta this past November, the answer was Skribit.
The occasion was Startup Weekend, when individuals in a particular city come together in a loosely structured — some might say “creatively chaotic” — exercise to create and launch an Internet-based company from scratch. A facilitator organizes the event and helps manage the proceedings, but leadership naturally emerges from the social dynamics of the group’s interaction.
A new business isn’t necessarily the main purpose of Startup Weekend, according to Lance Weatherby, who facilitated the Atlanta event. It is designed to provide an intense educational experience while building and strengthening a high-tech entrepreneurial community.
“This event replicated a lot of the things you go through starting a company, but in a very short time period,” explains Weatherby, who helps new companies get off the ground in his day job as a venture catalyst with the Advanced Technology Development Center. “It’s a great experience for people who haven’t been through the startup process before.”
The weekend also brought together a lot of people with similar interests, he adds. “We have a really vibrant high-tech community in Atlanta although we don’t necessarily have that reputation. Startup Weekend was a way to bring some attention to the things that are happening here as well as provide an opportunity for people who are interested in high-tech startups to get to know one another and build a community.”
Startup Weekend is the brainchild of Andrew Hyde, who conceived the idea early in 2008 in his home town of Boulder, Colo. The first Weekend proved so successful and educational for its participants that Hyde decided to take his “learning by creating” concept on the road. Events have been held in more than a dozen cities including New York, San Francisco, Houston, Boston and Washington, D.C., as well as Toronto, Canada, and Hamburg, Germany.
“When I called Andrew and asked him what it would take to bring Startup Weekend to Atlanta he replied, ‘You need a place,’” Weatherby laughs. Thanks to his connection with ATDC, the center’s 5th Street facility was available. But Weatherby hadn’t expected the response he received from area entrepreneurs. Within a week of announcing the Startup Atlanta dates, the 70 open spots, considered the top manageable number of participants, were taken. A waiting list would grow to 120 names, prompting Weatherby to institute a $20 participation fee. The money covered costs for food and a T-shirt emblazoned with the Atlanta Startup 2008 logo, but more importantly distilled the attendee list to include only those most committed to the session.
Given Startup Weekend’s time constraint — it begins at 6 p.m. on Friday and ends at 11 p.m. Sunday — companies are limited to Web-based applications. Plus, “Web applications are very capital efficient relative to what they were seven or eight years ago,” Weatherby notes. “Bandwidth and storage are cheap, and people can create something with their existing skill sets. You don’t have to spend $500,000 up front to make a profit.”
The minimal supply and equipment costs for the weekend are offset by corporate sponsors.
As with previous Startup Weekends, Friday night was devoted to a brainstorming session where ideas were debated and argued before a concept was selected by vote. Many people drop out at that point, and the final team may consist of a couple dozen or so, Weatherby notes.
The remaining participants — called Founders — form groups to perform specific tasks such as programming and technical issues, marketing, and development of a revenue model.
Founders receive equal shares of stock of the LLC they create while 5 percent of each enterprise goes to Hyde’s company, Startup Weekend LLC.
Friday night’s inaugural session produced some 40 possible company ideas ranging from an astronomy social network to robotic parking, but the idea that carried the day was a social-software widget — that is, a shareable, easily accessible web application — the group named Skribit. It’s a tool that allows bloggers to take suggestions directly from their readers, thereby providing a new way for bloggers to interact with their communities. With Skribit, readers can submit topics and rank the topics they would like to see posted. Hot topics are displayed on Skribit’s “What’s Hoppin’” list. Bloggers can manage and evaluate the suggestions, tailoring future content for their audience.
Technology blogger Paul Stamatiou, creator of the concept, credits the idea to a chronic problem on his blog: writer’s block.
“I try to write daily, but that’s often a challenge in itself,” he says. “That’s where Skribit comes in and taps into the wisdom of my readership.”
Previous Startup Weekends produced Ededlbild, an online photo editing service; LobbyThem, a Web site that enables users to lobby their local elected representatives; and ScrollTalk, a contextual chat room.
While Skribit may or may not succeed as a commercial enterprise — that is up to the founders — the weekend certainly proved that Atlanta is a hotbed of innovation, Weatherby says.
“There’s a new generation of entrepreneur that’s out roaming the streets of Atlanta, and I think this event captured a lot of these folks,” he explains. “This new breed doesn’t necessarily have a lot of business training and background, but they’re very technical and very smart and very astute in understanding what the marketplace potentially wants.”
Perhaps the dynamic of Startup Weekend Atlanta was best captured by Paula Brantner, a veteran of several StartUps who chronicled the evolution of Skribit on atlanta.startupweekend.com. On Saturday night, after a full day of head-scratching, brainstorming and anarchy she wrote:
“Finally a bunch of people had hit a groove — they were rolling. Someone was drawing things on the whiteboard. A team of three was taking pieces of it and coding it in real time. Problems were getting solved instantaneously. Leaders had emerged, because they had figured out exactly how to communicate to one another to get the job done.
“Similarly, among the PR/marketing team, a massive to-do list was under consideration. People stepped up and grabbed their assignments. What looked like an impossibly long list transformed into a plan.
“Sometimes the structure of the weekend makes it hard for that to happen. Sometimes the personalities in the room make it hard for that to happen. But with time and perseverance among those who stay (and sometimes it takes people going home, whether for the evening or because they’ve dropped out) the synergy always seems to eventually happen. And it’s a beautiful thing when it does.” ABM
