Andy Rankin

My involvement with Startup Weekend goes back to when Brian headed out to Boulder to give a talk for the TechStars guys. His trip overlapped with the first Startup Weekend so Brian took a detour out of his follow-on vacation to stop by. He talked to Andrew Hyde and the guys and mentioned that we might be interested in doing something back in DC.

Will apparently had the same idea and also contacted Andrew about it. Matthew was right behind and the ball got rolling on planning for the weekend. Brian and I have had a decent amount of experience with traditional web startups - having had several over the years as clients at Viget Labs. We weren’t sure how much we wanted to, or would be able to, participate in the weekend in DC but we knew we wanted to be involved.

When we started planning the weekend we were slated to be in our new office space by September 1st so we offered to host the weekend - it seemed like a good test of the new facilities. When I found out that the Startup Weekend schedule conflicted with another appointment on my calendar (the predicted arrival of my second child) I realized that my involvement would have to be limited.

Brian and I helped out with the planning over the weeks leading up to the event when we could but really Will and Matthew drove the process with guidance from Andrew along the way. As the weekend got closer we had to scramble a little to get the office space ready. We weren’t sure how many people to expect. We had a huge number of people express interest up front (something like 140), but then a week after we put out the request for people to do their buy-in we had less than 20 lined up. That was still about a week and half before the event and once everyone was there on Friday evening I think the count was in the 70-80 range.

I didn’t participate much in the actual building of the company, HolaNeighbor, over the weekend. (I did throw out a last minute idea, which managed to make it to the final 5 only to get rated 5th by all 6 groups.) I did my best to keep the facilities up and running. Saturday evening the network crashed hard and people started to bail. I was at home with my wife, wondering why our child hadn’t arrived yet, but I zipped back up to the office to see what was up (the office is just down the street).

I’m not sure what the network problem was - power cycling the router seemed to clear things up. At the peak we had close to 60 wireless connections, which was impressive to me, especially since our wireless network had been up for only a couple of days and was totally untested. The rest of the weekend seemed to go by without any major network problems - our 10 Mbps internet connection seemed to hold up well too.

From my perspective it was a fun and interesting weekend. In addition to meeting some cool people and having several interesting conversations I got to see how various people work, how they tackle a challenge like building a web application in a weekend, and I also got to see the new Viget office space rockin’! It was fun having people in the space, enjoying the double conference room, the garage door, and of course the Wii!

Here I am 5 days after the weekend and still no second kid. Maybe Startup Weekend will swing through the DC area again sometime and I can jump in a bit more. Brian and I have some ideas related to that - we’ll have to see how those shake out.

Oh, and this weekend is Startup Weekend Chapel Hill. At least one person from our Durham office is going to check it out and I think we’re slated to buy the gang down there lunch on Saturday. (We would have more folks attending if it weren’t for RubyConf going on down in Charlotte this weekend.) I’m sure they’ll have a blast and I can’t wait to see what they put together.

(Lot’s of photos of Startup Weekend DC can be found here.)