Lessons from Startup Weekend Seattle 2

My family doesn't really understand why spending a whole weekend with a bunch of geeks would be so important to me but at least they didn't begrudge me the time. Having participated twice now, I find Startup Weekend is a bit like a real-life reality show, a laboratory environment for controlled experiments dealing with real-world issues.

It's fun - lots of fun - but I probably wouldn't take so much time away from the rest of my life just to have a good time. These weekends are also really valuable.

For one thing, I find it so much easier to connect with people - get to know them and really bond with them - when we're working together for a common purpose. It's so much better than standing around at some networking event trying to figure out what to say to one another. It's even better than most ice-breaker activities or events billed as 'team-building' because of how fully engaged people are in what they're doing.

Plus, as Marina Martin points out on Nathan Kaiser's nPost blog about Startup Weekend, working together in close quarters like this also provides a great opportunity to see how people work - together, under pressure, with and without direction, and when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. After a weekend like this, I have a growing list of people I'd love to work with on real world jobs and projects and probably a few I'd have to think a bit more carefully about first.

Beyond experiencing the power of the event for yourself, here are a few of the lessons coming out of Startup Weekend that I thought were rather universally portable into other situations...

Step Up
Things happen because you make them happen. If it matters to you, take matters into your own hands; don't wait for someone else to do it.

Be a Leader
Leadership is often more about helping the group define their vision and about removing obstacles in the way of that vision than it is about dictating who should do what and how. All it really takes is wanting to be of service.

Assume You Know Enough
You may not feel like you know everything you need to know but that doesn't necessarily mean that someone else knows more than you do. Dive in and figure it out; learn as you go along if you have to.

Get Passionate
The work can be tough enough without making it tougher, trying to work on something that you have to push yourself to do. Work on what pulls you in, propels you, compels you to be involved.

Work With People Who Share Your Passion
You don't have to agree - in fact diversity of opinion helps - but look for and stick with people who feel as driven as you do to succeed in your chosen direction.

Accept Some Ambiguity
Any creative endeavor involves a certain amount of uncertainty. If you already know everything you're doing, it's an assembly line that robots could be doing instead, Certainty is not creative and definitely does not produce anything new. Embrace the ambiguity and harness the chaos to bring about real innovation and change.

Work Through Challenges
Whether you steer around obstacles, stay persistent in the face of challenges, seek out new solutions, or accept workarounds when you have to, it takes dedication to keep moving forward - and moving forward should always be your goal, no matter what setbacks you might encounter.

Use Available Resources
You never know what you need or what you might be missing. Look for and be wiling to accept help and information from a variety of sources.

Pace Yourself
Whether it's a sprint or a marathon, managing time, energy, and other resources is an important aspect of success. Know what sort of race you're running and plan accordingly.

Slow Down
Understand what you're really trying to build, for whom, and why. Listen to feedback. Make paper prototypes before committing to code. In the end, you'll actually be saving yourself time and headaches by spending some time thinking and planning before jumping straight into the actual work.

Have Fun
When all is said and done, work and life are both a lot better when we can remember to laugh, enjoy ourselves, take some time to play, and (in general) just not take things too seriously.

Look For Opportunities
When challenges arise, there are very nearly always gifts and opportunities - but only if you're looking for them instead of focusing on what's going wrong. Consider it a matter of choosing the approach most likely to produce the best outcomes.

Celebrate Success
The results may look exactly as you'd imagined... or, more likely, like something different, less or more. Whatever it is, celebrate whatever is right, whatever you have learned or accomplished.

Say Thank You
Someone has helped you get where you are, has helped make things easier. Show your appreciation.

I know there are a number of people I'd like to thank for making Startup Weekend such a memorable event.

Thank you John Smilgin for taking the ball and running with it and for joining forces with Rob Eickmann, Nathan Post, Ilene Little, and Marina Martin in doing such an amazing job with planning and execution and for bringing in so many great sponsors.

Thank you to Whitney Keyes for getting us such great media coverage and to George Junginger for his assistance and insights in running the event.

Thank you to Google for hosting the space and especially to Jessica Einfeld and Wesley Chan for their persistence and determination in resolving various issues and to Bob and Justin for taking such good care of us throughout the weekend.

Thanks also to all of the terrific sponsors who made the Startup Weekend possible - Perkins Coie, nPost, Microsoft, Blue Box Group, Type As, Inc for meals, Peets for coffee throughout the weekend, and Big Al's for very affordable, very good beer. Thank you Aviel Ginzburg for creating the cool t-shirt logo.

And of course - a huge 'thank you' to everyone who participated. Thank you to everyone who came out and joined in, worked hard, spent time on projects, helped keep things tidy, laughed, and had fun. Thank you to everyone who followed our activities and shared in spirit.

Thank you to those of you who spoke up about what you needed and helped participate in finding solutions. Thank you to everyone who helped create some buzz about this and future events and to everyone who shared ideas about how it can be even better next time. Startup Weekend just wouldn't be the fabulous event that it is without you. Thank you for being part of it.

What can you do to make your next gathering worth repeating?

Twitter - Jumping the Gap

Perhaps it's because I'm more involved in Twitter these days but I'm finding more and more evidence that Twitter is jumping the gap - beginning to cross the chasm between early adopters and going mainstream.

Of course, for some, this is about as welcome as jumping the shark but this is the stage of maturation I really love. I love the discovery of something new, figuring out how it can be useful, and then sharing that vision with others until they get it themselves. My first experience with this whole World Wide Web aspect of the internet was like that and now with Twitter, I'm actually melding that with a return to a comfort zone distinctly reminiscent of the early days of BITNet.

Near daily, we're finding new uses for Twitter. Now that it's not just about what sort of coffee drink the person in front of you is ordering, it's not just about marketing either. During the snow storms last month in Seattle, finding out weather and road status were invaluable tools for coping with all the disruption.

And Twitter is great for breaking news. Tweets today started full of news and speculation about Steve Jobs and quickly moved on to subjects like the plane crashing in the Hudson River and other topics that regularly take a bit more time to reach mainstream media.

In fact, it was at least three days between when I heard about the pantsed Vail skier via Twitter and the first forwarded email in my inbox. News junkie that I am, I'm following news-oriented Twitter accounts as fast as I can discover them.

From these uses, it's not at all a big leap to thinking of using Twitter in emergency situations including using Twitter as an emergency broacast system and the possibility of having Twitter play a role in a larger technology solution for emergencies and disasters.

Twitter has been a great discovery mechanism as well - finding new people, finding blogs like the one published by Washington State Department of Transportation and finding lots of other great sites and interesting information.

It wasn't so very long ago when the notion of being rescued with Twitter was a big deal. Now that this seems an obvious go-to, I wonder where we'll head next with this technology. We like to make predictions this time of year - how do you see Twitter being used in the future and what would it take to get there?

In any case, the pattern I've noticed is technology is often used for fun before it's real usefulness is identified and put to work. It doesn't hurt to think about what's fun in our own lives and how that might be made useful.

How do I use technology to move me forward?

Easy Money - Developer Focus Group Week of 11/3

Why should you consider the focus group below? My personal experience is that focus groups

• are almost always interesting - and are often fun
• provide insights around what's next from companies
• sometimes provide a forum for providing feedback that will actually be taken into account
• are occasionally worthwhile financially
• nearly always lead to more focus group opportunities

Extra exclamation marks aside, here is an interesting one aimed at Developers. Since I'm a very low-grade hack, I don't come anywhere near qualifying for this Gilmore Research focus group scheduled in Seattle for next week - but maybe you do...

Attention: Mobile Developers!

The Gilmore Research Group, a highly accredited marketing research company, is currently undertaking an especially interesting project which we hope you find fun and exciting! We are conducting an interesting study in our office the week of November 3rd, 2008

We are seeking Mobile Developer across various platforms for a developer study and if you qualify are participate you will be paid $225 for 1.5 hrs of your time!

If you are or know a mobile developer, we would like to hear from you!

All information is kept strictly confidential and we are in no way selling anything.
Data collected is for research purposes only.

In order to qualify, Please email the following answers. Based on your answers we will then give you a call.

1) Name:
Phone:
Best time to reach you:

2) What is the primary context you develop for?
Laptops/desktops 1
Cell phones 2
Handhelds (e.g., game boys, Palms) 3
Other (specify) 4

Again, Please email us your answers and based on your qualifications, we will call you.

If you have any questions about this please call 206-219-1942 and ask for the study about Mobile Development.

In advance, we thank you.
-The Gilmore Research Group

For further information about our organization, please visit our website at http://www.gilmore-research.com

If you qualify, I encourage you to contact them - they've always been pretty cool to work with in the past. And if you are accepted, post a comment about your experience (the parts you're allowed to share anyway) here for others to enjoy.

Have fun!

What do you want to know?

Solving Puzzles and Mysteries

I love solving puzzles. Can't stand to sit on mysteries. That probably has a lot to do with how I got into Tech Support in the first place. When I started seeing the wild photos of the Mukilteo ferry running through the "sort of big" windstorm last week, my first question was - where did those come from?

Actually that was the second question. Let's just say I've had forwarded to me more than my share of fake, totally or mostly untrue stuff over the years.

Anyway, I'd have gone digging for the source of the photos except I got sidetracked playing NotPr0n. I can't even blame Brad. All he did was link to the guy who used NotPron as a metaphoric term. As I said, I can't stand to just sit on mysteries and the sentence just didn't make sense without knowing more about notpron... so I just had to go check it out.

Fortunately, while I was feeding my new-found addiction, someone else dug up the story on the ferry in the windstorm. And of course the original ferry photos are even more impressive than what I'd seen already. Thanks CitizenRain for spreading the word!

Don't send me any more puzzles, riddles, mysteries or fake internet junk - I don't need any of it, even the stuff I like. If you feel like talking privately about notpron levels 1-12, I'm here for you and can be reached at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com

What could I use less of in my life?

Leggo My Lego!

So much interesting is going on right now that it's almost too much. Now that I'm back in town again, I've been joining the other folks in putting out some feelers for space for Startup Weekend Seattle (know of anyplace that'd work? we'd love to hear about it!) and it looks like I may be helping to re-write the curriculum and co-teach a unit on customer support for a UW certification program. We're making headway on those plans anyway and I'm excited about the prospects.

That's just for starters. There are plenty more irons in the fire too and on top of all that, there were so many articles of interest in the business section of the Seattle PI on Monday that I hardly know what to do with them all. The highlight for me was probably the article on Lego Serious Play. I've been interested in LSP since November, when I got to try it out for myself at the ICF Conference in St. Louis last fall.

In fact, I forwarded the article to Robert Rasmussen, figuring he'd appreciate knowing it made print here in Seattle. I'm glad I did; we've been talking about how to get me into one of the certification sessions and he mentioned that there's likely to be one in Vancouver, BC sometime this winter. I'm so there. I just have to make sure it doesn't conflict with Startup Weekend!

All I can say is with everything popping up at once, it's both scary and exciting - kind of like those thunderstorms Monday night which were way cool to watch by the way; it's just too bad that we had an obscured view - even our treehouse wouldn't have helped much in that regard. I'm just glad that Small Person is back to school so that he doesn't have to feel neglected as I start getting into all the cool new stuff happening.

Whether you're interested in Lego as a business performance tool or have ideas about space for Startup Weekend, I'm interested in what you have to say. You can send messages to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and we'll build on that. It'll be fun, too - so long as you leave at least a few of the cool Lego pieces for me to use too.

How can I tap into fun and excitement to help get things done?

Follow the Leads

In which Kimm draws parallels between reporting, troubleshooting, geo-caching, and intuition... In the newsroom, I had a basic plan for tracking down stories that worked mostly without flaw - I'd poke around enough to come up with a handful of names worth contacting to get more information and I'd talk to them if they did. Sounds simple enough, except a lot of times they didn't have the sort of information I was looking for, so that's when the plan kicked in. I never let anyone off the phone until they answered one other question - "Do you know anyone else who might be able to help?"

It might take a few calls, but this method almost always worked; I'd just keep following the trail until I got what I wanted. Looking for the next clue if I couldn't get at the answer itself helped get me out of a few jams when I was in tech support too. Sometimes it was as simple as following a single thread and other times it was tougher and more like following breadcrumbs - find one breadcrumb then start searching for the next one, hoping the birds haven't eaten it.

This summer, small person and I have discovered geo-caching and I'm finding there are some similarities. We go to the latitude and longitude coordinates identified for the cache and then start following whatever clues and intuitive instincts available until we make our find. Sometimes the GPS coordinates are just the starting point - there are more clues or coordinates to find and follow before we actually find the treasure box and that makes it all the more fun. Or frustrating, depending on our perspective at the time.

Sometimes I stumble upon clues by accident and it occurs to me that this may be the best metaphor I've stumbled on yet for how to understand intuitive insights - especially the really strange ones defy any kind of reasonable explanation, even when "reasonable" is stretched enough to include some mechanism such as uncommon senses beyond the normally agreed-upon five senses. Sometimes where you're led isn't the ending point. Sometimes it's just the next clue in the trail of breadcrumbs we're meant to follow.

If that's true, recognizing whether we're at the destination or just another step closer is probably part of the puzzle to be solved. Good thing I like puzzles!

How do you solve puzzles? Send your methodology to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and let's talk about what does and doesn't work, when and why, and when & why not.

Where might the thread I'm following be leading?

Not in My Right Mind

I don't know about the rest of everyone, but sometimes writer's block turns into something more like writers' bottleneck. At such times, it would probably be helpful to just move onto the next topic instead of staying stuck. There's a message there somewhere. I'll figure it out & get back to you... well... sometime. In the meantime, given that I let myself stay stuck for so long, let me just point out that I'm thrilled to discover that a) some play can have a purpose and that b) there are really good, left-brained/analytical minded-appealing reasons for developing and engaging right brained thinking too. And some fun ways to go about it.

My father, a leftie, would probably be pointing out about now that given the link between brain dominance and opposite handedness, only the lefthanded are in their right minds. As bad a joke as that is, it's actually related to some of what I've been exploring lately more in-depth.

One of the perks of having a small person around the house is having ready access to Lego bricks - one of my all-time favorite toys - so I was pretty jazzed to learn not-so-recently-now (back in November, at the International Coach Federation conference) that there are some good justifications to playing with them that go beyond just having fun. The Lego Serious Play folks say you can actually unlock important information by playing with Lego pieces as a way of facilitating communication between the two halves of our brains - and yes, it does seem to work. At some point, I'm sure I'll get licensed to facilitate this process... I'm that interested in it. If you're interested in it too, be sure to let me know as it might influence how soon I get in to get this done.

Not only is the process fun, it's also based on sound brain theory, which means that it meets my definition of cool, being both neat AND useful. This engaging both halves of the brain to get at better answers is definitely in line with what I've been saying for years, even if it hasn't exactly been out loud. As far as I can tell, an analytical approach that is open to intuitive-based quantum leaps of thinking will always (and I tend to use absolutes rather lightly) be far more productive than either approach alone. This is what I call being logically creative. LSP not only helps make that process possible, the brain theory upon which it's based explains why it's so useful.

And now Dan Pink explains in hard terms why we should care to even look at a right-brained approach to matters when so many of us got where we are and achieved our greatest successes by focusing on one that is strictly left-brained analytical. With hard data that the most analytical mindset can appreciate, he explains in his book, A Whole New Mind , how and why that road is a dead end if it's the only road we travel. It's worth reading. And if it means nothing to you, then I'm guessing that what I do and how I do it probably means nothing to you either. No harm, no foul. When you're ready, we can talk.

I'm guessing though, that a lot of tech folks will get it if they stop long enough to really think about what's involved in their work. The ones who understand why it's important to be able to take ping pong, pool, or foosball breaks from time to time in the afternoon - because tech work is as creative as it is logical - will get it. Those who understand the need for logic laugh long and hard at the total lack of logic in, say, the Kids in the Hall sketch where the guy actually thinks he'll get the car started by washing the windshield. And who doesn't love a good laugh? The thing is, those who also understand the importance of the creative element will probably keep their jobs longer.

And if you accept the basic premise, then what? Figure out how to nurture and tap into that creativity, I guess. Playing with Lego bricks (with or without the Serious Play element) is one way. So is any creative endeavor, really... crafts or other artistic expression, music, you name it. The folks at Face the Music use writing and performing blues tunes to engage creativity toward a useful end, so do check them out if that's an appealing-sounding option.

I'm interested to hear your own observations about blending logic and creativity - send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and let me know... do you believe they belong together, or are they separate pursuits?

How can you use creativity to expand the reach of logic?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Corollary to Paradox of Play

So here's a thought - what if those team members who are not quite as productive as everyone else - the ones that are not so bad as to make their manager concerned, just have low enough productivity to be mildly annoying to the rest of the team - what if these people actually have some value that goes beyond what is measurable by normal individual stats? A sort of corollary to the the Paradox of Play as applied to teams, if you will.

I can think back on several teams to individuals that fit this general description. Invariably, these were the same team members that organized potluck lunches and other social events for the team. Sometimes the other members recognized some value to this social contribution and sometimes it was the source of some derision or overlooked altogether. But even when their efforts weren't fully appreciated, it sure seems to me that these people had a positive impact on the team as a whole.

True, if I have to choose between these folks and those who are more consistently productive, as a manager, I'd probably go with productivity. But I sometimes wonder if maybe there's some kind of synergy between the more socially adept and the productivity-focused that make the whole team more effective than it would be without them. They might not be putting up the same numbers as the other team members, but maybe they're helping to boost everyone else's stats simply by their presence alone. I guess that would make them some sort of a catalyst if it were true. Not that I can prove this theory at the moment but it'd probably be worth investigating, don't you think?

I'm sure that at the very least it's more enjoyable to be on a team that has some fun while they work and that's got to be worth something too, right?

If you have thoughts about the social butterflies one way or the other, send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com - I'm definitely interested to get some more data on this one.

How do you balance fun and productivity?

~~.~~~.~~~~~.~~~~~~~.~~~~~~~~~~~.~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

The Play Paradox

Somehow we've got the notion into our heads that playing is somehow trivial - less important than "real work". Fortunately, I've seen enough evidence to the contrary that I rarely feel guilty anymore about playing, even when I'm getting paid to do "real work". I suppose part of it is feeling subversive, but only part. The truth is, as much as I enjoy having fun playing, I enjoy even more discovering how that fun can be turned into something useful. It's rewarding to see the playtime pay off but it can't be about the payoff or it's not real play. That's the paradox of play. To riff off of Julio Olalla a bit, only true purposelessness (when it comes to play anyway) can lead to purpose.

One of the first times I really understood that was back when I first got to try out this new application called a web browser. I was at that time suffering rather serious withdrawals as a result of no longer having access through the academic world into BITNet - one of the early incarnations of the Internet. Fortunately, the whole world wide web thing started getting really popular about then, and suddenly, for the first time, it was both cool AND okay for corporations to get in on the game. And so I started playing around with it. I made sure I got my work done but make no mistake, I was playing - using company access to the Internet and company time, I was fooling around, learning what I could about what was out there and how I could find it and how it all worked. It was fun, pure and simple.

Of course no one else around me seemed to really get what was fun about this. My analogies to a library that constantly responded to whatever ADD-like impulses might strike, following idea upon idea just by clicking something as mysterious as "hypertext links" was, at the time, fairly inept. I kept at it, though and friends and family mostly tolerated my craziness. Then one day, I ran across information about the hypertext markup language itself that made the whole world wide web a more user-friendly place than had been the BitNet-based file storing and sharing of my college days. Just click on a link and you're there. And wonder of wonders, I was delighted to discover that HTML wasn't at all complicated. In fact, for a small fee, there was even a relatively inexpensive editor you could get that made the coding work even easier.

Excited about the prospects and what we might be able to do with such capabilities, I took the idea to my boss. I didn't have a lot to show him at that point except for a lot of hand-waving and more library analogies. While academics had been using it for quite some time by then, the internet was still mostly a place to play at that point for the average corporate hack. But there were a small handful of companies that had started to put up customer-facing websites and a couple of them were even involved in our market - networking - and so I managed to convince my boss that our company ought to think about having a website too. We could publish the kinds of solutions and information we were currently providing our customers via fax and BBS. It would be a great resource as more and more people began to see the power and usefulness of the internet. It would give me an excuse to play some more.

Ultimately, my manager saw enough in my suggestion that was worthwhile to say that he at least wanted to see more. Could I do a mock-up of what I had in mind so that he could see how it might work in reality? He even gave me the money to get the HTML editor. It was called HoTMetaL . That summer, my stepson spent most of his time at his grandmother's so I had relatively few family duties for the entire month of July and a good chunk of August. I put in a lot of 14-hour days learning how to create a website, building the proto-type, and populating it with the kind of information I thought would make it useful. It was some of the most fun I've ever had and I like to believe that I mostly enjoy life as a general way of being most of the time.

At the end of it, I had something worthwhile to show my boss and we took that to various other executives in the company who also began to see the benefits. To be fair, I wasn't the only, or even the first, person in the company to be playing around with this stuff. I was just the first one to figure out how to make a convincing argument for turning what had been playtime for me into something valuable for the company.

By the time we went live with the project three months later, the surprise for me wasn't so much in that I'd been able to make it happen as it was more that we were going live with the proof-of-concept prototype itself. I never once thought it was good enough to be the real deal - my mock-up was just supposed to have been a way of showing people well enough how it all worked to get them interested in making the idea even bigger. Ultimately that happened too and within about a year - give or take a few months - our corporate website looked nothing at all like I'd first built it. I couldn't have been prouder.

This isn't the only time that I've seen play turn into something more worthwhile . And certainly it's not the most important event of my life. I play every chance I get and I make an active effort to remember to take time out to play and explore. And even though I don't always make that quantum leap from purposeless play into purposeful work, it happens a fair amount of the time, mostly because that's who I am. What makes this event stand out is that the linkage between the play and the result is so clear. While I still make an effort to ensure I am productive "enough", I rarely worry about whether I'm playing at the expense of being productive. In my mind, they're related, not mutually exclusive.

I'm curious - what pet projects do you have going that are fun for you and valuable at the same time? I hope you'll consider sharing them with me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com - and if you want any tips for getting support for your project(s), be sure to let me know. I've got that part pretty well figured out by now.

How does play fit in with and impact YOUR life?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.