new technologies or features to developers. Facebook has one called Developer Garage. Each month the company invites developers together to talk about the latest features, such as Social Graph, Facebook Search or Facebook advertisingpanies such as Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn and numerous other big software companies organise similar events all the time.
attend if you’re not technical. Go along, pretend to be a developer (to get in), enjoy the pizza and beer, and then start talking to anyone and everyone. Not only will you get a flavour for what’s hot in terms of technology, but you’ll also start to understand how software developers think and communicate. You may even be inspired by the new features and apps that other people are building. TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCES. No matter which city you live in, you’ll find a
handful of great technology conferences. From TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, San Francisco and Berlin, to LeWeb in Paris, to DLD in Berlin and Web Summit in Dublin, there are countless conferences in most major cities. Go there, mingle, talk to people. And make sure that you have ‘Founder’ in big letters on your name badge (people are more likely to talk to you if they think you’re important or have your own company). If you don’t have a company yet, don’t worry. Make sure that you’re prepared to talk about an industry or technology you find interesting – and then engage with people about that subject. If you do have an app idea already, then make it sound like a company (one that’s about to launch), and make sure you’ve got a snappy two-minute explanation up your sleeve about what it does and why it’s going to be huge. This is a great event, and is designed for those of us who
It’s a great way to spend a weekend and meet some amazing people
are time-poor. Think of it as an end-to-end business plan and software prototyping competition, crammed into a weekend. It is now operating internationally, with thousands of successful weekends completed. The concept is simple: turn up on Friday night with payday loans NY or without a great startup idea; people who have ideas pitch them; everyone else listens. By the end of the night everyone assembles into more or less evenly sized teams, with more or less balanced skills (the organisers do a great job of making sure the right composition of people is selected for each weekend). Over the course of the weekend, the teams refine their ideas and pitches, put together a presentation and then hack together a basic proof-of-concept piece of software by Sunday afternoon. The final team presentations happen on Sunday evening – and a winner is crowned. MEETUP. As well as being a great startup itself (Dom Preuss, a good
STARTUP WEEKEND
friend of mine, used to head up the product development team there), Meetup is a platform that allows anyone to create and host any type of event. There are meetups for novice entrepreneurs, for experienced entrepreneurs, for software and app developers, and everything in between. It’s very much a bazaar – full of mixed-quality events and people. It might
take a bit of trial and error to find something great, but the point is that it has so many events that there will be one almost every week for you to attend, which means you have no excuse for not getting out there and meeting people! TECHCRUNCH DISRUPT HACKATHON. A hackathon is where developers (and
designers and people with ideas) all get together and build something functional – a website, an app – in a fixed period of time. In this case it starts on Friday night and culminates with public demos on Sunday afternoon. With more than 800 people taking part – twice a year – in both New York City and San Francisco, this is also a great event.7 You get great exposure to talented – and motivated – people and, if you demo something great, you get attention from not only others in the crowd (to build up your team) but investors who are waiting in the wings to invest in your nascent venture. ANGELLIST. One of the most promising places to find cofounders – as well as