Startup Weekend came back to town! In this case, it was the Woman 2.0 Startup Weekend promoting woman-owned and operated ventures. I knew I had to attend, but only to help out, and not to get sucked into yet another project!
This 3rd Startup Weekend for San Francisco was hosted by sfCube, a coworking and incubator space owned and operated by Dylan Rosario in San Francisco’s up and coming Dogpatch neighborhood. sfCube has a huge, nearly 5000 square foot facility on the corner of 19th and Tennessee, a superb location in my opinion (lots of free parking close by).
I’ve never been to an woman-only event (I’m a man after all), so I can’t say what those are like.
The mix at Women 2.0 Startup Weekend was about 70% women, 30% men.
The vibe was good, not as competitive as men-majority events.
(Women can be intensely competitive, check out any Junior League or PTA meeting for proof!)
In this case, natural masculine competitivenes seemed leavened by natural feminine supportiveness. The result: good feelings all around! Everyone felt encouraged to experiment, where there was no stigma attached to failure.
Women don’t eat as much as men! This is true! We had food leftover from every meal, in contrast to both Open Social and Startup Weekend, where we ran out of food at on at least one meal each event. The food maven, Shuchi Rana, did an excellent job in both cases… but some people just have to have super high piled up plates of seconds before everyone has had firsts!
(In any case, two weeks after Women 2.0 Startup, I’m having a piece of frozen leftover pizza… scrumptious!)
But let’s get back to Startup Weekend…
Pitch Fire
Pitch Fire is a method for rapidly pitching proposals. If I recall correctly, we had 27 proposals pitched, each pitched in around 5 minutes. Topics ranged from fashion and food, to hard-core technical applications such as a multi-paned code editor for syntax highlighting differences in source.
Now, my intention for the weekend was to network and to help out one or more teams with administration and project management details. In no way did I intend on actually joining a team. I have enough ongoing projects of my own right now. Too many in fact, and don’t need yet another distraction.
I did fine…
…until Sue Kim from Chicago proposed building an application to help people figure out what to wear. While it’s not really my problem, I totally understand that having a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear is a really big problem for roughly half the population!
Closet full of clothes, nothing to wear!
So I got sucked in.
We ended up being a small team: Sue Kim of course, along with Olya Lapina who I knew from the Google Open Social event back in February 2009, and Michael Wright, with whom I share a fair amount of coding knowledge.
Friday evening, we did some initial scope for an application, as yet unnamed, which would help people figure out what to wear given too many choices in their closet. We got a lot of great feedback and encouragement from other attendees. So we knew we were on to something, even if we didn’t know exactly what!
Stay tuned for Saturday, where I tell you about our initial prototype for Wardrobe Shuffle.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My wardrobe problems usually come down to “should I wear this t-shirt or that t-shirt”. I have watched enough women get dressed to know that not every person in the world has such a simple time with this conundrum.
This should be cool!
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We’re pretty excited about the potential. There seems to be a demand for something like this.
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