blakerson.com

Back in last fall, I had the pleasure of becoming a part of 3DayStartup, a 72-hour pressure cooker that sees people of all disciplines create and pitch companies in a single weekend. 

Coming off a contract gig at a startup, I had had some exposure to what's generally known as a startup incubator: an invitation-only space where companies come together, get some funding, share common resources and advisors and try to land a round of venture capital money.

This isn't an incubator, despite the presence of the common space, attendance by invitation, Important People as advisors, access to money, or common resources in the form of free Web hosting and productivity software.

It's more like a pre-incubator, or an audition round for an incubator. Perhaps the rock stars of this weekend could go on to interview for a real incubator. In fact, a few 3DS alumni have gone on to join the ranks of the great incubators like TechStars and Y Combinator.

But perhaps it's even better to drop the seriousness and look at it as a fun weekend for the entrepreneurially curious, a hiring opportunity for the individual rock stars, and a pressure cooker that comes with a demo day and some serious sleep deprivation.

I'll share my own 3-day diary to give you an idea of what I went through. 

Pitch competition: Somehow, 40 people turning up with 40-ish ideas have to whittle down to a suitable number of projects to work on. 

We first split into ten 4-man rooms, where people produce ideas and settle on a consensus idea to bring back to the big room. In my room, 4 ideas are produced. Two ideas from clueless young undergrad business majors quickly get thrown out, and it's down to a deadlock between myself and a talkative MBA named Dan. Personally, I felt pretty sure that my idea was better, but the guy was damn persistent. Our room takes by far the longest to settle the debate, even with a whole stack of Austin-area entrepreneurs coming into the room to hear the advice. It's a dead tie. Out of exhaustion, I intentionally blink first just so we can get back to the big room and hear everyone else's pitches.

The pitches are, for the most part, ehhh. One idea has all the pieces in the right place. Some ideas are really intriguing but lacking in technical answers, like a crowd-sourced amateur record production platform. Others, like the ones pitched by the UT Law students, are founded upon legal loopholes, are cut-and-dry, but will make money if they're legal. Others are completely lacking in direction and clearly have no business logic behind them. Within this crowd, the CEO of the aforementioned Austin-area entrepreneurial crew pulled me aside and asked why I'm not pitching.

1. Why the hell did I give up?

2. Who cares if the rules said one pitch per room?

So I sent a quick email, with CEO guy's endorsement, and got squeezed onto the tail end of the pitch contest in front of everyone. Everyone else got 5-6 minutes to pitch, and I got about 2. I still pulled it off pretty well, had a lot of interest signaled, and got compliments on the presentation throughout the weekend.

(Note - I still have my slides but won't post them publicly. Let me know if you want to see them!)

Next up was voting. Everyone lowers their head and closes their eyes and then raises their hand when their favorite idea gets called out. The top 5-ish ideas, out of 10-ish, will actually see teams formed immediately afterwards. 

I make it in just under the wire, and after people go to their desired teams, I'm suddenly de facto leading a startup of 7 people and Demo Day is in 48 hours. Dear God.

I go back to the house where I'm crashing and spend a sleepless night thinking about what I'll assign this ragtag team of people to do in the morning.

I come in around 9am a total mess from being sleepless the night before. Some people went home earlier than me, others later. My team is scattered, but as soon as I come in the project dies. 

A couple of girls stayed up doing more market research and found that other startups existed doing what I had proposed. With that, interest and morale had fallen behind the wayside. They ask my permission to leave, and given my lack of technical people I grant it and disband the project.

1. "Some projects die. Some get revived. It's 3DS" - various 3DS veterans (paraphrased) 

I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was more relieved at not having to lead the project without a team lacking in hard skills. I relished knowing I could just float through the day, do some good work to help someone else, and sleep that night rather than spend it sleepless prepping for Demo Day.

So I floated onto ReQwip, a new idea that had been born overnight by Dan, the guy who had generated the deadlock the night before. While his old idea made little sense, the new one tapped his many connections in sports to create a peer-to-peer marketplace for used sports gear. So while the deadlock had been completely unnecessary, I was glad to see that he had gotten behind a better idea. 

I occasionally visit other teams on breaks and find two big things.

1. Hackathons with young people will tend to attract "sexy" ideas, such as music- or photo-related, over ones that have solid business plans. The young people will move toward those ideas, so your idea has to be sexy if you want those people to work on it.

2. Too many cooks. Some teams just got way too big and went off in five different directions at once, depending on which clique you talked to. Sure enough, their Sunday pitches were materially the same as they had been on Friday and there was no prototype to show off.

3. I need to learn how to sleep when stressed.

Satisfied with my work, I call it a night early on and crash.

After a good night's sleep, I come in a bit before noon. Demos will happen around 6 or 7pm, so we have the afternoon to get it together. 

The demo isn't really coming together, but we start squeezing together something serviceable (with help from lots of advisors roaming the halls). 

The founders - who are starting to sound serious about taking this thing to market after the weekend ends - ask me multiple times to present, given how well I had done it on Friday. I insisted that the CEO present, since he's going to be the one eventually asking for funding. I know it'll produce ugly results, but he needed to have that failure to learn from.

Sure enough, he does fail. He crashes and burns during Q&A. It was cringe-worthy being on stage at the time as part of that team, but it was for the best. 

At the end of the whole shindig, there are some traditions that exist only for 3DS participants. I'll keep up the mystique - and not cause any trouble - by staying quiet. I will say that they're a meaningful reward for having survived the weekend with your brothers in arms. 

With several months' retrospective, reQwip launched. Two other projects launched, too: an online pet boarding reservation service (which had been the good presentation) and a daily deals site for photographers, which had pivoted out of one of the bad ideas.

I can also say that the experience is worth it, especially for those who don't have access to the serious stuff going on in Silicon Valley. Hackathons may be everywhere, and they may not be special. But this one has a greater sense of long-term value, networking and camaraderie. I'm still connected to the global 3DS family and they may become a valuable network in the future.