Andrew: Hey before we get started if you need a web app build, or mobile app build, who do you call. Check out Kumbia.com. They’ll take your idea from power point to product in just a few weeks. And when you go to Kumbia.com. I recommend you look at that top tab, the one that says, Work on it. To see their previous work. And understand what kumbia can do for you. From a minimum viable product to a full blown web app. They have you covered. They work on Rubian Rails for web, they can build an IOS or android app for mobile. Kumbia.com
If you need a phone service, a phone number, who do I recommend Grasshopper.com. Because with Grasshopper.com, you can get unlimited extensions. That means when a caller calls your company, They can basically be screened, before they come to you. If they’re looking for sales, you direct them to on place, if they looking for tech support to another place. If you looking to just get on your blog, maybe they go into voice mail, and you respond to them when you have a chance. Lot’s of extra features at Grasshopper.com, that’s one of my favorites. Go to Grasshopper.com, and understand why the virtue phone system that they create, is one that the entrepreneurs love.
If you need a lawyer, as a tech entrepreneur, you need to talk to Scot Edward Walker, of Walkier’s corporate law. Why, because if you go to the high end law firms they are going charge you an arm a and a leg and probably expect to take a piece of your business. They want shares in many cases. Or if you go to the mom and pop law firm, the one that your friend recommends. That lawyer is probably not going to understand issues that you go through as a tech entrepreneur. I recommend go to the guy who specializes in start up entrepreneur, Scot Edward Walker of Walker Corporate law.
Here’s the program.
Hi everyone, My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitions up starts.
Joining me today is Marc Nager, He is the head of Startup Weekend, a nonprofit, which helps entrepreneurs launch a start up in a weekend. I invited here for two reasons, the first reason is I got a vision for my audience.
Marc, first of all welcome to you, Marc.
Marc: Hey, thank .
Andrew: Marc, I got these visions for my audience. I want these guys to just not build companies, but to really make me proud by building legacy businesses. They want the to not just have costumers, but people around the world that are part of these things that they are building, a part of the movement that are growing.
You have done that, you have created this movement with Startup Weekend. It’s getting bigger, and bigger. I keep reading about the companies that are launched through it.
I want to find out how you did it, I want to find out how you coordinates so many people around in the world, I want to find out how you em-passionate them to even have them come out of their homes. And I want to do it for selfish reasons. so my audiences can do something similar. In their business in the mission.
And the 2nd vision I have for this interview is, I want to know how you can launch a business in a weekend.
What you have to cut out, what you have to focus on, what you have to do, in order to launch within a weekend. Because if you can launch a company, essentially within a weekend, then my audience that already has companies and launch a product within a weekend. Or may if they don’t have a company yet, they can launch their own start up by learning from the way that you guys did it.
So Marc, again, welcome and thanks to doing this interview with me.
Marc: Hey, of course. Thanks for having me.
Andrew: So first of all how many Startup Weekends branches are there around the world?
Marc: Currently we are in about 140 cities around the world. About 37 countries. We get between four and five legitimate applications now a week.
So it’s kind of growing by the day.
Andrew: Applications for new cities that want to do this.
Marc: Yeah. we have a very open model. Kind of control open source model, if you will, we help really vet local organizers. So if you’re in any city in Katmandu, and you passionate about start ups in your community and you want to help catalyze some kind of events or have some kind of program. Startup Weekend is a great option, and a great model. Just reach out to us and we will train, the trainer model. And really work with them closely to help get something up and running and ensure that it’s extremely high quality .
Andrew: Do they pay you to have the right to do a start up weekend?
Marc: No. It’s not a franchising model.
What we do is, we do try to cover our over head. Generally how we’re funded as an organization, we have a core team of about 10 people, Kaufman Foundation, as well, as other global sponsors like Telio and Microsoft, Bismark, like Amazon, help support our fundamental operations. And then each city, each community has its own, operated independently. And really we focus on then raising local funds and then charging ticket fees to cover the costs that are associated with that to do an event.
Andrew: OK. I want to come back and ask you why you made it into a nonprofit, and why you are not doing this for all it’s worth, my friend.
But all kidding aside, let’s give my audience an example of what can come out of a Startup Weekend.
Can you give me one company we can talk about just to illustrate what Startup Weekend can produce?
Marc: Certainly. I think one that maybe a lot of people heard about most recently, we kind of always go off the most recent examples. But, [Zarlee] is a really interesting one, a fun story, and something we’re proud [??].
Andrew: So, what is Zarlee?
Marc: So, Zarlee is a buyer-driven market. You can say, I want X and I’m willing to pay Y. So, really focused on getting what you want, when you want it. And, all focused around your local community [??]. So, Startup Weekend is actually a concept that was around before my time, and it existed kind of in a different form. It was a for-profit entity, and I think there were about thirty-two events, and I was a participant in one of those first events, in the first year and a half, back in 2008. The model was, originally, to get 100 people in a room, have them all work on one idea, and then Startup Weekend would take an equity stake out of it. That model kind of really evolved and started to focus on what were the intrinsic values that everybody was really taking away, out of the room. And that was that experience, that real learning experience, and that ability to meet other people, connect with them on a really deep level. So, as it was evolving, my co-founder, Clint, and I actually went to Andrew, the original founder, and he was in Boulder. We were on a road trip, and said, ‘Hey, Andrew . . .
Andrew: Is this Andrew Hyde?
Marc: Andrew Hyde. We said, ‘Hey, Andrew. We’ve got all these ideas. What do you think?’ And he said, more or less, ‘Go for it.’ Let’s see what you guys can do. So, we picked it up, and with a lot of passion, not really knowing what we were doing, but a whole lot of energy behind it, we took off from there, and ended up buying Startup Weekend the for-profit entity from Andrew, and turning it into a non-profit. And we had really built the model with the intention of scale it around the world, and help share that experience.
Andrew: What were the first things that you guys did before you bought Startup Weekend from Andrew? What were some of the things that you did?
Marc: With the model itself?
Andrew: Yeah. You went to Andrew Hyde, and you had a bunch of ideas for him. What did you do with them? What did you do after you talked to him?
Marc: We actually started organizing our first couple events. Let’s see, one here in Seattle locally, and one in San Francisco. And we went and kind of tested our ideas, and it was kind of the natural evolution of what had already been started, and kind of really fell in love from there–saw the energy and passion of everybody else around us. So, we knew we were on to something.
Andrew: What are some of the ideas that you had that you implemented, and how did they play out?
Marc: Fundamentally, it’s figuring out how to build a model that’s scalable. We charge for our events, but we charge at a rate that’s, you know, between $75 and $99, and that’s more of less to cover the cost of seven meals, drinks, and associated supplies, and costs for putting on the event. We knew we weren’t going to make money, and didn’t want to make money off of charging entrepreneurs for it. Gathering sponsorships was more of less, you know, an open thing, and something we were able to go out and do and get a lot of support for it initially, as well. Refining that model, and then really honing in on the fundamentals of what the event was about–it’s not about creating startups. Andrew did a great job of really helping us find that this is about building communities. And we took it a step further, and really, about that experiential education that we’re able to provide.
Andrew: So, it started out with the idea that with a for-profit model that basically said, we’re building startups, here, and we’re going to profit because we’re going to get a share of these businesses that are going to launch here. Why do you think that wasn’t the right model for this?
Marc: And I don’t think it was 100%, you know, intentional. It was just a natural evolution of, hey, we’ve got a cool idea. Let’s kind of see where it goes from here. That wasn’t the right model just because, you know, fundamentally, what were people walking out of the room with? And it’s not guaranteed that you’re going to walk out with a startup. I think that’s nice. That happens no matter what.
Andrew: But at any accelerator there’s no guarantee that a real startup will come out of it, or that that startup, if it is real, that it’ll succeed. It feels like this is earlier stage version of the incubator. Why do you think it wasn’t the right model for this?
Marc: It’s really focusing on, what can we do during the weekend? You know, what’s our educational process? What are those experiences? And, kind of, those honestly life-changing moments that a lot of people are having. How can we hone in on that and focus on making those more impactful, more meaningful? The more we focused, started to focus on that and emphasize that, you know, the correlation of successful startups actually increased along with that. Having that mission really also helps drive home the point, this is early stage, this is as early as it gets. This is also for fun, just getting all the different players in any given community to come out and roll up their sleeves and work together and not just, you know, get to hang out around drinks.
Andrew Warner: I see. Do you feel the for profit model kept people from being involved in it, kept people from coming out and participating in it, because they might have been worried about a piece of their idea going to someone else, just because they came out to a learning experience?
Marc: I think so. Just understanding what the mission of the people behind the model to, really emphasizing that were not looking to rape any entrepreneurs and steal a buck from them, but really share that’s experience a lot more embodied and epitomized by being a nonprofit.
Andrew: What did you guys pay for the business?
Marc: Roughly about 150,000.
Andrew: Wow, $150,000 for an idea that Andrew Hyde [SP] came up with.
Marc: Yes.
Andrew: Unbelievable. How many cities was he in when you guys bought it?
Marc: I think it was 13 cities and 32 events, some rough number right around there, right when we were coming in the door.
Andrew: And why didn’t you just decide to go in and create your own start-up weekend. Give it a different name, says Andre’s got his own thing, we’ll just go and launch ours instead shelling 150000 from the start?
Marc: The brand that he had built and the community he had built, he was absolutely amazing at doing that, and he had an amazing following too, and we really respected him and everything that he had created too. So to go off and create something from scratch would have been a lot more difficult, time consuming, and, not really the message we wanted to send out. We knew if we were able to take it over, and do something with it, and continue to scale it, that would be a much better foundation to start with.
Andrew: What do you think it is about Andrew Hyde that enables him to build something like this, to get it to the point where it was with the community, with the name recognition, how did he do that?
Marc: He’s always been extremely creative and thoughtful person. I always look to him for what things are next, what things are on the horizon, and he’s always got a very interesting and amazing insight on what type of stuff that is. He’s very much on the forefront of what’s next.
Andrew: All right. So you recognized that this was next you guys were enthused about it, you wanted to be participants, you became participants, then you ended up buying it, from him for $150000, where did you get the money from?
Marc: We actually ended up kind of financing it through operations. We were more or less poor ourselves, so we bootstrapped it. We actually didn’t pay ourselves until about a year and a half into it. Then finally last October, we ended up getting funding from the Kaufman Foundation, which really helped us meet our potential and really scale from there to where we are right now.
Andrew: So the money that you paid for it, you paid over time, he essentially took a note from you, he didn’t take cash.
Marc: Correct, yes.
Andrew: How long did it take you to pay off that debt?
Marc: Still going.
Andrew: Oh, still going, OK. How far into it are you?
Marc: I think a little bit more than half way now.
Andrew: OK. Marc why didn’t you guys, that brings me to a question that I had early on. Why didn’t you guys keep it as a for profit business and grow it as a for profit business.
Marc: Again, it’s just the model and really what fundamentally was working in the model and that experience and harnessing that, and really what we were passionate about too. Building a model that was going to be able to scale around the world to and having the right vision and mission and kind of essential branding behind that, that was crucial to it.
Andrew: I see. That if it was a for profit business where maybe you sold franchises, or kept a share of the revenue, fewer people would be eager to participate in it, and fewer people would be influenced by what you’re building.
Marc: Exactly.
Andrew: So if I were to take lessons from this program, and from your experience, one of the first lessons I should take is, non profit scales faster because are more trusting and more willing to. What do you think of that?
Marc: Aside from just like a nonprofit, for profit Marc thing, I’m very much a capitalist at heart. So I believe that any entrepreneur is a social entrepreneur by creating value, solving problems, creating wealth for you, your family and those around you. I have this passion around just doing the right thing, looking at what you have in front of you, and being able to ask yourself, what can I do that’s going to have the most impact, for the most amount of people. And often times those aren’t financially driven decisions, but just having that extreme faith, and knowing that you can take that direction, and just drive the bus, and even if there is a cliff up ahead, that you can hopefully grow wings some how. In the process there is going to be a lot of people supporting what you do around you too.
Andrew: All right. I like the way you put that. So what did you do with it once you took it over and you changed the, you changed the business model. How did you expand it,
Marc: Pretty much we had open application and we ended up working around 15 – 20 hours days for a little bit. And then we realized we need a figure out how to make that sustainable. I think within a couple week period, we had over 100 applications for hosting these around the world.
Andrew: How did you get that, how did you get so many applications?
Marc: Just put the word out there. Honestly people are hungry, there so many influential, passionate people, that we’re interested in following the brand all ready, that’s when we kind of put a open call out to it, that we got huge response, much more than we expected even.
Andrew: Where did you put the call out, that to me is phenomenal?
Marc: Twitter, Facebook, and our blog.
Andrew: That’s it, just going on the Startup Weekend blog and saying this is what we are doing who wants to apply. People start applying.
Marc: Exactly.
Andrew: Interesting, wow. All right. So you had all these applications how did you pick the right people?
Marc: A lot of phone interviews. Just talking with people and then trying to figure out what they were excited about. And we were still fairly new at it too, so it was a discover process, and more or less we end up finding like the cultural fits. Just finding people that seem to be in lock step with what we’re saying and what they are saying too.
Andrew: What were you looking for them to say, what made them a good cultural fit?
Marc: Being motivated by the right reasons. there’s a lot of, I think people that are really want to get into this and hopefully make a quick buck or two. But one of the things we’ve decided upfront is that this is going to be a long tier driven network. And we want people doing this not motivated by financial reasons, but doing this because they are passionate about their communities and building their ecosystems.
Andrew: So if somebody call you up and said, hey you know what Marc, I see $75 -$99 as a great ticket price. I’m probably going to stack the place for 400 – 500 people. I get local sponsorship from local Microsoft office and couple of other people. We will make sure that everyone gets fed and we are also going to make a little bit of the money off of this. I can probably pull in $5000 profit from this, and I’d be happy to share some of this with you. And then we can reinvest that money in the future.
It’s not the right mind set for us. It’s OK, but it’s just not us.
Marc: Exactly. And we were especially looking for individuals that were doing this, because we knew this also served as almost a great leadership development program. I’m actually, I just sent out a survey and might have boxes, I know well over half of the organizers and facilitators that we have, that are involved in Startup Weekend now. Well over half of them have either changed jobs or been part of a new start up launch, launching their own. I think that’s powerful testimony to what being a community leader and being at fore front of leading efforts like Startup Weekend in your community can help you do. And we really encourage and try help people to do that.
Andrew: I see, you’re saying that, as a leader in this place, in Startup Weekend. They end up with better opportunities. They end up doing more with their lives, starting businesses, because they have taken on this role where they’re helping other people.
Marc: Exactly. They’re not building a brand for a company that’s got a profit motive. They are building a personal brand that’s going to help them. Hopefully get where ever they’re going to go.
Andrew: One of the problem of working with individuals is, some of them become flakes, some of them get overwhelmed.
Can you tell me how that plays out with Startup Weekend, or how it did in the beginning?
Marc: Yeah. I think that we learned a little bit, through that application process. learning a little bit more what we were looking for. But again it’s just about finding great people and I think now it’s a lot easier, and quicker for us to judge, in just an application and couple of phone conversations, or something, who those people are. I’m looking at what they are already doing in their communities that type of a thing.
Andrew: OK. That’s the indication that someone is going to stick around, if they have done this before.
Marc: Yea, yea.
Andrew: What’s another indication that someone is going to do well?
Marc: Someone that’s actually already working on a startup. Because I think somebody that is a little bit closer, to the start up world, understand the needs and fundamentally what we’re doing in our mission a little better.
Andrew: I see.
If they are starting up their own start up, wouldn’t they be distracted by that?
Marc: Certainly, but the, this is a volunteer thing and aside just one individual in every city, we look to help build a committee of two, three, four people. And it really depends, varies city by city. But having more than one person, too, is definitely something that’s helpful, so it’s not too big of a distraction for any one person.
Andrew: Who picks the other people? Is it the head who ends up doing that?
Marc: Generally, it’s pretty organic.
Andrew: Yeah. OK. So, you pick someone, you say, yes, we like you. You have the right mindset. You have the right spirit. You have the right background for this. You run this in your city, and you put together a team of people around you.
Marc: Exactly. And, you know, that is one thing that’s really been fundamental to our growth. It’s kind of that faith. It’s empowering people. Andrew did that with us to some extent, you know, kind of giving us the keys and seeing where we ran with it. I think we do that too, that minimal vetting process we go through, and then essentially giving the people the keys. I don’t think there’s been one event that we’d ever call a failure. I don’t think any huge ball has ever dropped by doing that.
Andrew: What kind of structure do you give them in addition to the keys?
Marc: So, we provide all of, you know, we’ve got an extensive wiki of the best practices, and everything from like the philosophy behind what we’re doing to actually running the events, and the checklist for setting all that up, as well as providing the website, the social accounts, and the marketing support on our end from whether it be through our blog, or whatever other syndications we can, as well as companies like Amazon, for example, and BizPark. They have offices in a lot of these, or at least representatives in a lot of these cities. And they are willing to actually send their people in to help out. So, that’s an additional resource–or provide a venue. So, we’ve already negotiated a lot of those types of things. Amazon actually sends like all the supplies for an event. They drop ship them to every event, which is an amazing value to just have tape, and stickers, and name badges, and giant post-it notes, and all that stuff just show up on your doorstep. And aside from that, every event we require one person to be flying in as a facilitator. And that’s something that every event requires to have in their budget. So, we’ve essentially created this network, now, fifty to sixty people who’ve done five, ten, fifteen Startup Weekends, and they’re flying all over the world at this point, creating this whole cross pollination of cultures, and start up communities. It’s been a really, really powerful thing for, you know, the person development of those people, as well as influencing the events, and giving them a new perspective.
Andrew: It’s amazing. I don’t know how to express the way I’m feeling about that. That’s amazing. OK. So, you got a facilitator who comes in, and this is a person who’s experienced. What does the facilitator do?
Marc: So, the facilitator has the experience of knowing how to . . . a lot of Startup Weekend is what not to do. There are so many factors at play, the various cultures, and venue often plays a big aspect of the actual dynamics of the event itself. Knowing how to run the team sessions and the voting process, and how to help teams form efficiently, and kind of being able to massage that and take the lead on helping. Again, it’s the train-the-trainer type program.
Andrew: By teams, you mean people come to Startup Weekend without an idea, necessarily, without a list of buddies. They just come in there, they meet people who they’re going to partner up with. They get into groups. They create startups together. At the end of the session, at the end of the weekend, or towards the end of the weekend, they show off what they’ve built, and there’s voting on which startup is the best.
Marc: Exactly. People can come in with an idea that a minute or a year old. And, on Friday night everybody’s got 60 seconds to pitch, generally about a third to half the people in the room end up pitching. And, what ends up happening is these ideas that they pitch, it really serves as an efficient mechanism to connect people around their passions and interests. So, as soon as you get the ideas out there it really, the thing that’s actually happening is this networking, this facilitated networking. And, once people start to form those relationships, they build the teams around those ideas. Then they end up working on the ideas for the rest of the weekend. We provide some extra resources, some mentors, some workshops, and then by the end of the weekend we have the final presentation, where what we’re looking for is the customer validation. What have they actually been able to prove? What problem are they actually solving, and how did they prove that over the course of the weekend? It’s amazing what you can actually validate just by going out and asking your potential customers. We also look at the business model, and as well, the actual execution of the team.
Andrew: All right. I’m going to come back to the customer validation, because I’m curious about how you can validate an idea in such a short period of time. For now I’m curious about though is, how did you know the customer validation is the important ingredient for the weekend?
How did you know that it’s important to have mentors, that it was important to have work shops, how did you know that those are the key elements?
Marc: The mentors is probably the most obvious one for any aspiring entrepreneur.
It ends up you always look to those who have the most experiences and success around you.
So invite those types of people to the event, was something, ever since the beginning of all Startup Weekends, conception I think that was part of it.
Evolving into like the validation type of aspects, it’s pretty fundamental, and I think just by going through the process, sitting in a room with hundreds of your peers, that could be potential customers and being able to turn around and ask a roomful of people what do you think of this, am I solving your problem, how much would you pay for this.
Those are pretty basic concepts that kind of evolved and we put those into the kind of best practice and philosophy and things that we emphasize too.
Andrew: Marc, do you guys do a postmortem afterwards with the leaders, with participants, to find out what worked and what you should bring back to the other groups you do?
Marc: Yeah. After every event we do kind of follow up, you know, QC survey. Finding out, what we could do better, are you going to come back, what did you think was this a personal success for you or was it more of a team success, did you learn something, did you find a co-founder, this type of things.
Andrew: What’s one thing you’ve learned through that you wouldn’t have discovered other wise?
Marc: I think it’s really understanding that people have, we ask specifically what do you rate your success as an individual during the course of the weekend, and what you rate your success as a team. Consistently the success as an individual. People really come away I think learning a lot personally through the course of the weekend and end up finding a lot of other people that they build deep relationships with.
So I think those are probably two of the biggest things.
And it’s kind of funny, people asks us, how do you measure success with Startup Weekend. It’s really driven by, not by start ups that come out of it, it’s the quality of the event that we put on for those individuals, It’s about the people. And our key measure of success, is actually measured by repeated attendance, after we’ve done one event. Repeat attendance, repeat mentors, repeat sponsors. How many more people are coming back to participate in this community and it’s right about 40%, which is extremely high. And actually we’re finding doing it five, six, seven, ten times in the city, that number continues to increase too. Which is a great indication that we’re providing value for anybody from the senior CEO, to those business angels all the way down to the entrepreneurs just getting out of university that’s still testing waters.
Andrew: What software do you use to keep track how often people come back?
Marc: We use WinBreak for executing and then we got a nice period of Google spread sheets and some equations that we use.
Andrew: So it’s just as simple as pulling out the spread sheet of the people that came to one event comparing to the next event seeing roughly 40% of the people repeat.
Marc: Yeah, it’s a simple look up, simple function.
Andrew: OK. I see. What else do I want to know about this?
Who recruits the mentors and who brings in the workshop leaders?
Marc: Leader organizer in every city is more or less responsible for that Startup weekend.
Like our core team, we actually end up reaching out and helping facilitate, like introductions to, especially the higher level speakers and mentors, but generally it’s 90% driven by local leaders.
Andrew: You know when I start to put these interviews together, I assumed that anything in person is just kind of a waste of time and it was more social than practical. Because on the internet you can do just about anything practical, and so why waste your time driving some where in search of practical solutions that’s more fun.
I’m discovering that real in person connections build tighter bounds within the people who join and also with the main organization that’s putting it on. And in this case is organization that’s just to put on events but look at Fred Wilson of ABC.com, he has ABC meet ups around the world, where people get together and talk.
So I see the value of it and I see other people doing it. But there’s something different about yours and you mentioned it earlier, it’s more experiential learning, it’s not just hang out and meet each other, it’s not watch a teacher teach, it’s experiential so I’m thinking for my audience, they might want around their business to create meet ups of some kind. They might want to not do social meet ups or listen to a teacher meet ups, they might want to do what you’re doing.
How do they do that what can others who aren’t building, who aren’t creating groups do start ups, how do they do that?
Marc: It’s finding those groups of people. One of the big things too is understanding that you need to be able to be open and talk about your problems and your ideas. Especially when we’re doing this in developing nations we face a cultural thing where people are very protective of their own ideas and essentially what an idea is a solution to a problem. We’ve all got problems that need solving. The more open and the more you communicate that to peers around you, the more feedback you’re going to get and the more you’re actually going to figure out how to get to that solution. Just finding those forums where you can do that, and do that freely, and do that where everyone is under the same mindset of being open and free and helping each other come to conclusions without worrying about it and ownership and ‘Are you going to steal this from me’ or anything like that.
Andrew: Now let’s see how that would play out. I want to see an example of someone who’s not you. I don’t want this to be a ‘Marc’s a special person who came up with one way that you can do an experiential event.’ I want us to see how we can take it back to our lives. Let’s take lean startups. Lean startup is a concept of simplified launches and feedback and all that. Eric [??] could do events all across the country where people just say ‘Yay lean startups ideas, let’s get together and drink and share that we love it’ or he can bring in people who are doing lean startup businesses to teach how they did it. That’s helpful. Or he can be more experiential. If you were advising him, what would you suggest that he do to make it more experiential, more like what you build with Startup Weekend?
Marc: Coming up with what that curriculum is in this kind of hyper condensed timeframe. Actually, we get to work with [??]. Love those guys. They’re actually helping us dig deep and analyze and pick apart our model itself. How can you come up with those things? [??] teaches a course over an entire quarter at Stanford. What happens when we can pull out some fundamental things and condense that into a shorter time frame. The shorter time frame allows it to be a lot more accessible to people. Allows them to actually bring it to your communities or to your office, wherever that might be too. Essentially coming up with other models where all know we can all work together as communities to find the answers to our problems. We don’t need teachers or anybody up on a pedestal to find those. It’s really empowering people to use a little bit of curriculum and a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of direction with something like lean. Using that as an underlying theme in some kind of event where everybody then gets together and expresses what are their problems and how do we utilize this tool to help us find the answers to our questions.
Andrew: I see. So you’re saying have one person at a time maybe stand up and say this is my problem and everyone else at the event give feedback to how they can use lean start up ideas to fix that problem.
Marc: Yeah, I guess that would be a really, really basic fundamental way to say that. At it’s core that’s essentially what Startup Weekend is too. People are getting up saying, here’s the problem, I think I’ve got a solution. We provide the model for the rest of the weekend to hopefully help them find their answers.
Andrew: Another word that I wrote down while you were talking was condensed. You kept saying look for ways to take what the big ideas are and condense it into a short period of time and force people to act on it in a short period of time.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: I see.
Marc: There’s a larger hurdle into getting into Stanford and sitting in [??] class for an entire quarter. But being able to take some core concepts out of that, just by reading his blog, I think a lot of people can glean a lot of insight into what he’s doing there. And figuring out how to package that up in kind of a neat way where it’s a lot more open and accessible. It’s all out there, any of these models, and people that are creative about doing this.
Andrew: You know what, I’m already coming up with ideas. Tell me if I’m wrong. But it might be something like, if the minimal viable product is key to Eric [??] ideas, then you say, by the end of today, you have to launch a minimum viable product. It’s not going to be a full startup the way that Marc’s Startup Weekend might do, but it’ll be a minimum viable product. How minimum can you launch within three hours and test it to get feedback? A m.v.p. should be possible within three hours.
Marc: Certainty, especially depending on your audience. If you’ve got a room full of developers and designers that might be able to come up with a simple technology solution, website where you could launch your m.v.p. and get some feedback on that. Another thing is just coming up with a hypothesis. The customer validation is a key part to that. Coming up with a hypothesis of what is the problem you’re solving and what’s it worth? And turning around and asking your peers, and maybe walking out in the street, you know, in a matter three or four hours if you’ve got an idea for an application for a restaurant, go talk to five restaurants and see if you’re actually solving their problem . . .
Andrew: Interesting. That can be done in an afternoon. It can be done in a meet up. That makes sense.
Marc: Exactly. A feature, or a product, or an actual business.
Andrew: So, maybe they meet at the mall where they know they’re going to get a good cross section of the country, and they talk for a little bit. Then they go out for an hour to talk to people at the mall. Then they come back and they . . . I like this. So, you said it’s experiential learning. You brought it up in the pre-interview in the conversation that we had earlier and you brought it up here in the interview. Tell me about this. Is this a movement? Is it your own word? Where is this?
Marc: I think it’s an entire movement. It’s new perspective and take on how education should be happening. One quick thing is, especially as a start of weekend addresses is entrepreneurships are not for just university student. The average demographic we have is 25 to 45. We need you about 32 years old. But in America the average age is like 40 for people launching successful businesses.
Andrew: Interesting.
Marc: And I think we hit that kind of core demographic. But being able to focus a little bit on how we’re addressing those people and how we’re able to essentially help target different audiences is key.
Andrew: You know, I’m looking down here at my piece of paper. You might have noticed me look down on a couple of times at this one thing. It’s the word, challenging. When I asked you, how do I make this a win for you in the pre-interview, you said, ‘Well, let’s make it challenging.’ And I was just thinking, I’d love to be the kind of interviewer to maybe shake things up, and mix it up with you and say, ‘You can’t launch a company in a weekend. What are you doing sending these people off with this belief that they can do it, and so on.’ It’s just not me. I know it’d be more entertaining, and people would talk about it, but I just keep thinking, where am I, who am I here in this conversation? Where I am is a person who’s freaking curious, who says, ‘What kind of ideas can I grab out of Marc’s experience in the short time that we have together? How do I use it? How do I send this out to other people? And one of the ideas I want to grab from you is more about this experiential learning, because I’m trying to do here through my interviews. I was just talking to someone earlier today who needs to come up with a way to train his people. I’m sure that just handing out a guide book isn’t right for him; or, teaching at the front of the room isn’t exactly right. So, how do we do experiential learning more places? How about online?
Marc: Yeah. Well, the whole notion of experiential learning, I truly think it’s like you were hinting at before. This is a whole movement that’s a fundamental difference how we look at educating people. And how we would do something like that online and that’s one key success to Startup Weekend’s model is, you know, we’re identifying problems. And then we’re connecting people around those problems that all feel the pain. And if we can identify the sub-sets of people that can share in the pain of whatever the problem might be, getting them to collaborate online, I think, would be a great open forum of discussion that would yield probably a lot of the most innovative, creative ways to look at that problem, and hopefully address that kind of eventual solution.
Andrew: All right. I’m writing this down. Identify the problem; discussion is a better way to learn, then just sitting back and listening, and solution. Don’t answer questions the way you might on a test, but look for solutions.
Marc: Yeah. And then, again, it comes down to that validation. I think that’s one of the harder things, you know, we often get asked how come we can’t do Startup Weekend online, or open it up to global audience, or something. But, you touched on it earlier. There’s this real human interaction, being able to sit down with somebody, create something, there’s something psychological about that that’s really intrinsic and I think building that bond with somebody. Because fundamental to any successful startup, it starts with the people. It starts with individuals, you know, kind of this notion of co-founder dating, finding the right people that you can work with. Once you have people you can work with you essentially have a team, right? And then, only once you have a team can you have an idea introduced. Once you introduce an idea to a team, then you have something called the startup. And the definition of a startup is just a group of people with a hypothesis searching for a business model. So, really, really keying in on how do we get those individuals connected at that earliest phase in an efficient manner? Because most often you’re not starting a business with your college room mate, or your best friend from high school. It’s going to be somebody that you somehow randomly connected with over whatever passion or interest you might personally have.
Andrew: As you were talking about the importance of a team. I was thinking back to NYU, those entrepreneur classes which I took. Where they put us into teams, and they said you got to learn how to build start ups as teams. And inevitably there is one person who just love the idea and was going to charge forward with the idea, and you all just kind of hanging on to his business. And inevitably there is one person who just going to sleep walk through it and half ass it and not do anything. And that person is draining and the other person is a pain. And how do you deal with that in an environment where you’re setting people up, who are strangers into groups and forcing them, not forcing them but asking them to work together?
Marc: It’s extremely organic at a Startup Weekend. And I think the most successful team are the one’s that are the most poignant about they want to accomplish in the course of the weekend.
Being able to, you don’t have to in a classroom setting, something where your professor says there’s five people per team and for better or worse, there’s going to be five people. But if you can set it up and say, hey we got a problem and I think we need this amount of skill set, anybody that’s really passionate about it can do it. If you’re not passionate about it don’t even talk to us, because you’re not going to be part of the team. So that kind of naturally happens. And I guess the questions then is what happens to people that maybe don’t feel like that they are included in a specific team. Well, that’s the reason there is 15 ideas floating around. For 99% of the people, if you’re in a roomful of other people who are somehow passionate about entrepreneurism, start ups and trying to solve a problem, good chance you’re going to find at least one subset or one idea that you can relate with, and use your background and experience to contribute to the discussions.
Andrew: I think that many of the start up companies that I’ve met, have multiple founders, I mean not just two but four, or five founders, because of this process.
So let me ask you this marked in a very confrontational challenging way.
Does Startup Weekend, cause companies to launch with too many founders, divide up their share of the company in too many ways. Force too many people to stay together in an untenable environment.
Marc: All right. Now we’re talking. That’s a challenging question.
There is a really interesting thing we notice about Startup Weekend, I talked a little about the individual success rate. And the most successful teams, the most productive team, as voted by the individuals, are the teams with between seven and eight people on them.
So which raises a really interesting question. What barriers do we, our culture, and our financial structures, socially impose on the actual formation and productivity of teams. Because the only thing governing, why you should have two co-founders or four, its money. It’s financially driven. Conversations that happen, right, how do we split up ownership, how are we going to give everybody a payroll, salary and all that kind of stuff.
But it’s interesting if you remove that, that people naturally, just human nature is to group into teams of between seven or eight people. And those are the one’s that are the most efficient, the most productive, and walk away feeling like they have accomplished the most, and learned the most.
Andrew: That’s interesting, and I guess companies do function well when they have more people than just two guys trying to do it all, And the reason they don’t have more people often is they can’t afford to have more people.
You’re still sending them off to the world where they have to raise money, environment that’s not specially welcoming of multiple co-founders and earn a living where a start up can barely feed two people on Ramen noodles, they have to feed eight people that means many of them are going to have side jobs or are not going to be able to sustain.
Marc: You bet. So I guess that’s kind of the reality of it. We all got to walk out of there on Sunday nights after a Startup Weekend and know what we are going to do on Monday.
So I mean what ends up happening more times than not is finding out who actually have the ability to invest their time in doing this. If some of the champions of the idea, the leaders of the team aren’t able to do it, generally the idea is going to fade off.
But we advocate and we see happen a lot too is there is a hand off to. Who, the person who was first championing leading the idea hands it off to somebody else who does have the ability and does have the passion and the time to execute behind that idea. That hand off is generally made to.
But coming up with the whole co-founder notion, how do you figure out all that stuff in real live. I think that’s just some teams are able to address and they are real live questions too,
It’s a challenge that is inherent in almost any start up.
Andrew: All right, Before I move on and spend a little bit of time on what it takes to launch a company so quickly.
Let’s make sure I wrap this up properly. Someone in the audience, let’s say Seth Godin’s in the audience, and he’s coming out with a new book. And he says, No, I’m not going to do a book tour where I’m going to go sit in Barnes and Noble, across the country, and talk to people about my book. I want it to be more experiential. I want it to run without me, and I want it to be a community that maybe will continue to grow after I’m done with my book tour. I just heard Marc talk about what goes into it. I can partner with Amazon, too, maybe with a couple of other organizations. I could launch this out by finding a head in each city [??]. What other advice would say to Seth that he needs to remember? He’s about to go out in the world armed with Marc’s ideas, and Startup Weekend’s philosophy in his heart?
Marc:
How do we actually empower, how do we provide kind of a curriculum and deliver that curriculum, whether it’s through a book or whatever to help empower people? Because, empower people to do this in their own communities? I think it’s key to have it be open, have it be accessible, by the people who are passionate and able to do this? Nobody can be the one-man road show, but if we can empower an army of people implementing and collaborating around one philosophy, especially if it’s one of the most effective philosophies, I really think that’s the challenge, and that’s the most effective high-impact way to do it.
Andrew: To give them room to do it themselves, to come up with their own ideas? That’s how you got this role in the first place. But you also use the word curriculum a few times. And I’ve seen that groups that get together with a shared interest, but without knowing exactly what to do, tend to fall apart. So, you’re saying a curriculum is important. Tell them what to do. Tell them what the process is. Let them change it if they need to, but at least give them that skeleton.
Marc: Exactly. Give them that bare-bones infrastructure, and kind of give them the keys to have the unlimited potential to make it as big a thing as they possibly can.
Andrew: But, another problem with that is, you come up with the curriculum. How do you do it? How do you come up with the curriculum from a distance?
Marc: I think it’s simple. We were talking about Steve Link [sp] earlier. I think again, Seth, Eric, any of these guys we could take some of their philosophies and figure out, all right, what are some key things in their philosophy? We talked about what could you do in an actual three or four hour period. How we merge some of that philosophy with what you can actually accomplish in a short amount of time. And obviously, generally the shorter the amount of time the more accessible it is for more people. So, you know, there’s a number of models out there. I happen to think just the Startup Weekend model is pretty effective.
Andrew: Pretty effective? Damn effective, man. Terribly effective. You and I connected because a founder who I interviewed, T.A., who runs Gist, he bought one of the companies that were launched at Startup Weekend, learned that name. He bought it, and he talked about Startup Weekend, and I said, ‘T.A., can you please introduce me to the guy who’s running it. I got to do an interview on him.’ We’re not done with the interview. I just wanted to say I’m damn impressed with what you’ve built. Let’s get now into what are the cores? What’s the core to launching a company within a short period of time?
Marc:
Starting with the people. Having people that you can work with, and knowing that. And being honest with yourself about that. And finding complementary skill-sets. Finding a corner of yourself probably isn’t the best person to launch a company with, but somebody that can challenge you in good and productive ways. Once you have a person, or other people that you know are great complements to one another, and then it’s finding that idea. And how you execute on that, an idea, I think, utilizing a lot of these, like glean and customer developments, and coming up with a NVP and testing those hypothesis, making sure that you are actually solving the real problem, and you’re actually going to be creating real value and that there’s actually the people out there who are willing to pay for it. You can do that in as little as a weekend. So, yeah, doing it quick, and focusing on that before you invest tons of money on legal structure, and looking into investors.
Andrew: So, finding the right people. You said, ‘Be honest with yourself.’ Is there an issue where entrepreneurs end up partnering up with people who aren’t really ready to start a business with, but they can’t say to themselves, they can’t say to the person who they’ve just joined up a group with, hey, this just isn’t going to work. I don’t even like the way you look, let alone the way that you think.
Marc: Yep. It happens all the time. It happens all the time.
Andrew: All right. So, extricate yourself quickly from those groups. Be honest with yourself and then for the good of both teams, and let yourself move somewhere else. Another thing you said is, ‘Look for a problem.’ Can finding a problem be as easy as saying to the roomful of people, raise your hand if this is a real issue for you? Are you willing to pay for it? It sounds like that’s what you were saying earlier.
Andrew: Going to pay for it, sound s like that’s what you were saying earlier?
Marc: You can simplify something as easy as that. That will be something really interesting exercise to do something like that. But in a very simple way.
Essentially yes, and coming up with how do you test that.
Andrew: OK. And the next step is customer validation test that idea.
How do you test an idea within a weekend, how do the people at Startup Weekend do it?
Marc: So I mentioned the running out and talking to five restaurants, if that’s pertaining to them.
But maybe you have an online or web service or something.
You can actually throw up a website, put splash page and you can put whole bunch of what you think are you key main points, you’re addressing and do some social medium marketing and do some Google AdWords. For the cost of like $100, you can probably get at least a thousand people to come to your site. And you can watch how they are interacting with your site, are they coming to it and leaving, or they actually engaging, and converting.
Andrew: Are you actually doing that at Startup Weekend, putting up $100, buying Google ads and seeing if they are, and they can get results that quickly?
Marc: Yes. We had a team I think by like Monday morning or something they had almost a million hits. And then a handful of other ones that have, one of my favorite is Fake Whale, it was really challenging Twitter. It superimposed other, like celebrates twitter background on your twits, so it looks like it’s coming from them, when you twit something, And it ended up getting 100,000 people using the service or on their site by the end of the weekend. And then on Monday or Tuesday, or something immediately after, they got a letter from the lawyers at Twitter.
Andrew: But there, what they are doing is launching a company by the end of the weekend, they are validating that people are interested.
Can you buy ads and in three hours know whether people are interested in your idea?
Marc: Yes.
Andrew: You can?
And you’ve seen those people buy the ads that quickly, build a landing page that quickly, and get orders or rejections that quickly and know what to do next.
Marc: Yeah. It really depends on complexity of like your idea. But you need to have an attractive landing page, that can’t be just a bare bones stuff, so putting sometime into building what you are testing with and how you are going to test it. Put some intentionally thought behind it, is definitely needed.
Andrew: All right. Fair enough. Actually in today with something like Unbounce, you could create that in minutes.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: They do AdWords, do some quick customer validation.
How you launch a project quickly?
Marc: How do you launch a project quickly?
I guess it really depends on what’s the industry, on market, on what your service and product is going to be.
Andrew: But you want your users, I mean you want your participants to launch within the end of the weekend.
Marc: Yes.
Andrew: Amazing, so how do they do it, how do they actually put up a site, design it up, get it out there, in a couple of days.
Marc: It’s capitalizing the talents in the room and being able to come up with something basic. The goal is by Sunday to have a some kind of presentation, even if it’s a power point slide deck of your mock ups. Being able to illustrate that vision and understand how people are going to interact with that. That’s kind of the goal, but we have fully functional iphone apps submitted to the app store on Sunday evening. And that’s a team thing, that’s how well, you as a team, you and your team execute on an idea, that’s obviously a fundamental parts to it.
Andrew: All right. I should probably bring somebody who went to Startup Weekend, and interview them on how they launched the company within a whole weekend. Really get a sense of what they had to cut out, and what they were able to do quickly.
Marc: You bet.
Andrew: All right. What else is on the list here?
What did I miss?
Marc, if I want to copy what you did. what else do I need to know?
Marc: You want to copy what I did. I don’t know.
Andrew: Not launch a whole start up weekend.
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: You guys have that market pretty solidly locked.
Marc: I take it as a complement. You want to copy it obviously.
Andrew: I’m telling you I’m complementing you all over the place. I want my audience to go and copy what you’re doing for their own groups.
Marc: Perfect.
Andrew: So what are we missing, what’s really important. If your brother will going to go out there and start some kind of movement, the way that you’re growing your movement.
What would you make sure, what would you sit him down and listen, you got to really watch this, be careful with that.
Marc: Again doing things for the right reason. Understanding how you’re going to have the highest impact on the most amount of people. And doing that the quickest way possible.
I think that’s something that seems a little trivial, but when it comes down to it, we have bills to pay and we need to put food on the plate. That’s much harder in practice, than it is in theory.
Andrew: The simplicity of it.
Marc: But, on a bigger scale, one thing that’s emphasizing where we’re going, too, is looking at, “Why is something like entrepreneurship so important right now?” In America alone, if we look at all of the net jobs created in the last five years, they’ve been created by firms less than three years old. One of the Kauffman statistics.
And that really emphasizes that jobs aren’t being created by big firms, medium firms, or even small firms that are ten years old. They’re being created by entrepreneurs, the generation of people that is out there creating these businesses right now, solving those real-world problems in innovative ways. That’s where innovation comes from.
Being able to use that, and focus on that, is a mechanism for growth. Growth is really the only way we’re going to get out of all these predicaments we’re in as a country with 10% unemployment. Our generation is 20% or 25% underemployed right now. Something incredible. But only by really encouraging and influencing that growth are we going to be able to solve our own problems. Entrepreneurship and startups, that’s one of the biggest ways to address that.
Andrew: Tell me if I’m being too selfish in the way that I think. I’m listening to you think about how we can save ourselves from a recession, we can grow this country, we can give jobs, and I’ll go on. That’s what I like to say publicly.
But when I think privately about why I want to do this and why I want my audience to do it, I think about Eddie, who put the tires on Ford cars a hundred years ago, and died with nobody knowing that he even freaking existed. Do I want my audience to be Eddie? Do I want to be Eddie myself, or do I want to be like Henry Ford, who left his mark on a whole industry, who really moved the world forward himself and got to be remembered long after he was dead.
I’ve got to believe that’s more inspiring for people, that’s more the real reason for it. But tell me honestly, because I feel like you can level with me here. Am I being too selfish why I say that’s what we should want?
Marc: Of course we all want to be Henry Fords. We all want to change the world. But I think it’s guys like Eddie out there living the day-to-day and facing problems–who better to try and solve those problems? We should be focusing on Eddie and helping him solve those problems.
Andrew: Making Eddie into Henry.
Marc: Exactly.
Andrew: Yes, I like that.
Marc: A lot of policy is so top-down, how do we inspire more Eddies to change the world? Well, it’s not coming down and having an organization that teaches Eddie, and puts him in a classroom, and does these things.
It’s getting Eddie to connect with his peers–a lot of the fundamental things about launching a business, forming a business that we were talking about earlier. It’s how do we get Eddie to come out from his job and find other people who are passionate about solving that same problem, giving Eddie some kind of basic infrastructure to build those solutions to those problems that he faces daily.
Whether that’s putting tires on cars, or making the tires themselves, or building buildings, or laying down infrastructure for new web businesses, or anything. It doesn’t matter who you are, I guess, is what I’m trying to say.
Andrew: How much of it is you wanting to leave your own legacy, too? That when you die, you want the world to know that Marc lived, existed, and did what you’re about to do.
Marc: Obviously, I never started out knowing or thinking that I’d ever be in the position that I am now. But it’s something I’m incredibly passionate about doing, what I’m doing today. And I see the continued potential to put 10X, 100X on what we’re doing and the impact that we have in the world. So leaving a legacy, that’s not my primary goal.
If that’s an outcome of what I’m doing, great. But I’m passionate about being able to continue to scale the efforts, and the impact, and hopefully make an impact in as many people’s lives as possible.
Personally, I’m not ever going to get rich doing Startup Weekend right now. But for me, it’s really an investment in who I am and who I want to be in my future. I want to be successful. I don’t know what that means. I know I want to be happy, and be able to put food on the table and all that good stuff.
But doing something like Startup Weekend, that I’m so passionate about now, is definitely an investment in myself. I’ve been able to meet some incredible people around the world, and do some incredible, incredible things. So it’s a great position to be in. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
Andrew: Absolutely. Thank you so much for doing this interview. I’m inspired by what you’ve built. I hope that I’ve helped my audience be inspired by what you’ve built. I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions to this interview. Marc, thank you so much.
Marc: All right. Thanks a lot, Andrew.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for watching.
