‘Startup Weekend is a community building startup event.’ It’s like a mini Ycombinator, but 2.5 days instead of 3 months. And you get to go home at night. Local Ann Arbor businesses donated food and space. We were well fed and had 5000 sq feet to play around in.
Friday night, business ideas were pitched and then everyone gravitated into groups of their choice to work on an idea. 38 ideas were pitched that June evening from tracking and reclaiming stolen metals like copper to providing travel advice on an iphone as you visit a new destination. By Sunday 4 or 5 viable businesses launched. That’s amazing. Pitch an idea, form a team of talented motivated strangers and launch a business in 2.5 days.
It’s polite to bring something to a party. I brought homemade cookies and an idea to create a high end handbag business based on the threadless.com business model. I felt kind of like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. It was at Startup weekend in June of 2008 in Ann Arbor that Threadless for high end handbags was pitched to an audience. Not only did 6 people join my group but one guy stood up and said ‘I want to use the threadless model to make low end bags and if Cathy doesn’t want to then I’m going to.’ Hmmmm.
That made things interesting because I wasn’t sure whether people were joining me or him. As it turned out, most people had something in between a $30,000 and $10 handbag in mind. Something maybe around the $700 mark. Fortunately for me, this guy turned out to be a little Hitler, and the group shrank from 8 to 4. We became a much more productive team.
By July, a lot of those businesses had fizzled out. You have to wonder how viable a business is when it can be built in a 2.5 day weekend by a bunch of strangers thrown into a room together under time constrained pressure. It was a really great exercise in social and group dynamics. You got to see how people act under pressure really quickly. My team drifted away by late July too.
Startup weekend is where Fossati handbags began to take shape.
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