Startup Weekend Perth was one of the highlights of my past few years!
As much as everyone gets caught up on ideas, I have always maintained that Startup Weekend participants should focus on learning - their ideas are simply the vehicle by which to understand the processes and techniques, which can then be scaled across your next hundred and one ideas.
Our uber-judge Hugh Mason looks at it similarly:
“The legacy is not so much the startups, it’s actually the relationships.”
And in the words of our facilitator Dave Moskovitz:
“The primary purpose of Startup Weekend isn’t to produce startups in 54 hours. It is to inspire the people who come along to continue on their entrepreneurial journey and connect them with other people and resources in the ecosystem. When they leave Startup Weekend on the Monday morning, if their 54 hour startup is a winner then that’s fantastic, but if not, hey, it’s a safe place to fail. Maybe one, two or three of the startups that come out of here will be go-ers, but the people who come will all have a new set of skills and a whole new set of relationships that they can apply to working on a real startup.”
PS - Another awesome quote from Dave in this video:
“Startup Weekends are the crack cocaine of entrepreneurialism. We’re giving them their first hit for free at Startup Weekend…”
[Originally posted September 2012]