I own about 60 books on leadership excluding the MBA stuff.  There was one that I kept coming back to me, it was a book I first read when I had just being elected to office and became the cabinet member for Cornwall County Council (UK) as Community & Culture “Minister”. This role was a real step up for me in terms of budget (71 million) and staff (over 440 spread out over many locations), where there was often upto 4 leaders between me and the frontline staff.

Eric Brooke newly elected to the cabinet of Cornwall County Council 2005

The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell by Oren Harari

This book not only had a lot of wisdom in it, that we often take for granted and thus forget.  I think the best kind of leadership book is one you walk away from and think/feel I want to be led by this person.  And to make it even better I know now how I can ‘upgrade’ myself to replicate this over time.

“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them”

In the end the leaders behaviour will create a culture, so the book and video I recommended were as much about context (i.e. of this new leaders organisation, and its culture).

Another choice was the video by Simon Sinek, Start with the Why

This video ties into the need to inspire and effective leadership is about inspiration not overt control.

The book The Power of Why by Amanda Lang, had a number of factors I needed, it is written by a women who is also Canadian and the stories come from other industry sectors. Context is everything.

“Permission to dream is also permission to fail”

A book I found useful early in my career was The New Leaders by Daniel Goleman (he also wrote Emotional Intelligence).  It was this book that showed me on reflection, the different leadership styles you will apply e.g. command and control has its place, depending on the context.  It was also the book that helped to delegate with trust when moving into middle management.

Great leaders move us. They ignite our passion an inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they are so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through emotions..

The last book is produced by CEO of the company with probably the best customer service on the planet.Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh journeys through time and a mans’ growth in understanding importance of leadership behaviours and their impact on the staff and thus the organisations’ culture.

Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-Minded

My last couple thoughts come from experience:

• That leadership is as much about vulnerability, as it is about confidence
• That followers choose who inspires and leads them rather then manages and controls them
• That women leaders are often better coaches then males, but the often to do not “give” territory for their coachees to succeed in.
• That “rebels” can often be bright people who are bored, give them something to do, they could become your greatest innovators

Finally leadership is a skill that you will never master, so expect to fail, maybe even plan for it, that said we often “love” rather just just respect the leaders more who have failed and have come back to succeed.

Rant… to a friend.. now even more rant like.. If you really cared, you would stand for election!

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world”  Mahatma Gandhi

Nothing human is perfect. Can you imagine if you were doing your job and there was an anti-you pointing out every mistake not to you but the media. Yet that is what we expect of politicians. How many business people could cope with that, strike that, how many humans..

Then we expect them to make statements that they will stick with for several years, even though the world changes.. could you imagine running a business or a charity that way.. shit happens, the world changes, who believes predictions anyways.. when governments have to plan they have to account for everything.. everything.. no wonder it does not always work out..

But its so slow.. Making decisions in government takes time, because they care about the stakeholders, they have to listen and balance and often compromise between the different stakeholders, else its called a DIC TATOR SHIP..the real shit is sometimes the decisions is irreverent because the world moved on..

In the end the political system reflects its electors..

The worst part of it is as humans we tend to remember the negative ads or the decisions in hind sight were poor (yeah fucking hindsight).. who says critical thinking is dead..

Make a choice: forgive or try something new out or create a new choice i.e. you standing for election..

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”  Plato

P.S. The reality of spoilt votes, is no one cares. Congratulations you have actually excluded yourself from the actual decision process, just costing the election more in the process by counting and recording your vote.

So I decided I would kickstart my journey with railsconf.  This was my first Ruby on Rails conference. I was honoured enough to win a scholarship, (I am a student at BCIT )to attend the conference (which paid for my ticket).  The rest is my pocket and vacation days. I just view it as a vacation And I need to buy jeans.. My level of Ruby on Rails knowledge is really low in fact up to chapter 6 of Learn web development with ruby on rails pre-confrence.

Sunday

I took a AMTRAK train down from Vancouver, BC to Portland, WA. It made sense train, rails.. Its a seven to eight hour journey. My theory here was I would be able to do some more study on the way down. There I bumped into about 8 others travelling down from various companies to railsconf. I got very little extra work done.

Scholarship meeting up

This was fun and warm meeting of other scholarship winners and sherpas.  My sherpa is Sam @geeksam . I got to meet some of the other ‘scholars’ a real mix of backgrounds and personalities .  It was good to have some friendly faces (Chuck and Miles were really helpful) in a crowd of  1500 people.  We agreed on a hashtag #rcguides.  Lots of passionate conversation was started, about how people got into rails… but we finished early. So my first night I went on a beer crawl with the hostel… I know where I went from my credit card payments..

Day 1 -Monday

There was a lot of talks to choose from, and this will be my journey through the schedule.

The opening Keynote was by David from 37 Signals (Rails was created out of Base Camp, which is built by 37 Signals).  His vision was that Rails should concentrate on the document driven web apps not the “GUI” e.g. Google maps. Rails 4 is about speed.  His talk led into some good explanations on how the caching is working in Rails 4. Some cool stuff.

How a Request Becomes a Response

This was part of the intro track, designed to educate newbies about the Rails framework and the community. A quick and easy introduction starting from the browser through to the database and back. It was really basic but very well presented.  There are a number of sessions on the intro track that can be found here http://www.railsconftutorials.com The wifi did not work but a smart person had a USB stick with the needed code.

Nobody will Train You but You

This was a funny and helpful talk by Zach Briggs @theotherzach, for those wanting to step up their game.  His talk showed how he managed his first year of learning ruby on rails.  His suggestions including writing down solutions he found on a piece of card.  Build up some katas and practice them, until you can do them without any reference to anything out. He suggested visiting a couple sites including Sucks rocks, Destroy all software by Gary Bernhardt.

Monitoring the Health of Your App

Presentation by Carl Lerche and Yehuda Katz stating that the average web response time is a stupid way to measure your app by.  The real world is not distributed normally. Web response are long tail, not standard bell curve. They have being working on a product to solve this problem and help rails app creators to track down the issues.  The product they are working on is at https://www.skylight.io

Rails’ Insecure Defaults

A most excellent presentation by Bryan Helmkamp @brynary (founder of Code Climate). Here are the problems and and here are the solutions and here is what rails should change. Bryan is pulling together a free ebook you can signup here http://railssecurity.com

Issues discussed:

Sherpaing

Taking a break for sessions I decided to get to know some of my fellow attendees and spend some time working through a problem with Sam (my shepra @geeksam).  I wanted to see how he broke down a problem and how he also read other peoples code. I learnt a lot.

Closing keynote

Michael Loop @rands was funny, insightful and argued the need for the Stables and Volatiles (personality types) if an organisation is to survive and flourish, his thoughts that were the meat of his talk are laid out here - http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/11/14/stables_and_volatiles.html.  What bookend or overarched, his talk with however, was a very important point – that we as a community have to be progressive, and that occasionally means leaving old stuff behind.

Reflection on the day

Awesome day. The conference food was good. I love how friendly the people are. How they will take so much time to listen and suggest. Kind of reminds of the early days of Apple that friendly community that is comfortable in taking on the world but is also open minded to listen. It surprises me how many Mac Book Pros I see everywhere, the only people who seem to have PCs are government employees! The venue is awesome there is space for everything, and I mean space to code, to chat. The WIFI is awful, really awful… The conference food was good. In the end I think I met about 50 people and introduced a bunch of people to each other.  All the nights events were fully booked and a bunch turned you away. To note for next conference book all the evening stuff ASAP..

I learned about the rails community and rails itself today and I liked it all

Day 2 – Tuesday

Breakfast at Mothers @MothersBistro 

Keynote – Yehuda Katz

Spoke of the importance of including Javascript in your architecture rather then using it as a “necessary evil” patch on. Good sassy talk.

TDD Workshop: Outward-in Development, Unit Tests, and Fixture Data

I went to this workshop but they had so many problems with setup, lack of internet access that I left. That said the notes were amazing http://www.railsconftutorials.com/sessions/tdd_tools_techniques/02_integration_testing.html

The Magic Tricks of Testing

Sandi Metz once again showed her love for bikes.Very clear presentation on what should you run unit tests on and where you should not. Here is the deck

Booths and T-Shirts

The exhibitors open up and everyone runs for t shits, I managed to get six. The hulu one has the nicest material..

Designing great APIs: Learning from Jony Ive, Orwell, and the Kano model

Philosophy and principles on how you should create APIs by Jon Dahl. His points were good but he used so many other peoples indicators or thoughts it felt like watching newspaper clippings..

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

George Orewell, ”Politics and the English Language,” 1946

Happy Hour

Free drink and food, good for networking and deeper conversations.

Reflections

Today felt a bit more abstract with the exception of Sandis talk. The conference food was good. The wifi is terrible.. pinging shows the issue is the ISP is not doing its job or the OCC has reached its limit.. Not great for a tech conference, maybe different venue next year.

All evening events booked up, went for dinner at a Grüner – german restaurant and then to Powells .. Powells I love this place

Day 3 -Wednesday

Breakfast

Back to Mothers for French toast covered in cornflakes

Keynote

A bit disappointing… but nice photos.

Ruby Heroes

This was a presentation of awards to people who have helped grow our open source community or take the time to share great code. Awesome. So many people help our open source community they should be celebrated

http://rubyheroes.com/#heroes

Properly Factored MVC

Again the lack of internet kills the effectiveness kills the workshop, but notes look awesome so I will come back to this later

http://www.railsconftutorials.com/sessions/factored_mvc.html

Creating Mountable Engines

By Patrick Peak, really awesome and clear presentation about how to re-use your code and options. It showed us how to setup a simply engine.

Crafting Gems by Pat Allan

A good presentation where he did not assume you knew anything. Good instructor.  http://www.railsconftutorials.com/sessions/crafting_gems.html also learned about https://travis-ci.org and http://rubygems.org

Lightning Talks

http://lightning2013.herokuapp.com

These were awesome either 1 minute or 5 minute talks from anyone.

Here is the first 20 to give you a feel, there was 42 to in all..

1. Nick Quaranto – OpenHack
2. Dr Nic Williams – Deploy your own Heroku with Cloud Foundry
3. Chris Morris – Technical Intimidation
4. Jon McCartie – Purposeful Code
5. Bryan Helmkamp – Code Climate
6. Andrew Harvey – Teaching an old dog new tricks
7. Senthil Nayagam – Mobile Testing with Robots
8. Miles Forrest – Cloning the Seattle Ruby Brigade
9. Benjamin Fleischer – MetricFu is back!
10. Adam Cuppy – “You’re doing it wrong!”
11. Hector Bustillos – MagmaConf great things happen in mexico
12. Hector Busitllos – The unofficial RailsConf schedule App
13. Mario Chávez – Logic programming
14. Mike Virata-Stone – Guard your forms with class, or any other selector: guards.js
15. Ryan Smith – Rails logs to metrics
16. Dylan Lacey – Giant Hamster Touching – Test Native Mobile Apps with Capybara
17. rking – Pry Power: Test Speediness Edition
18. Ivan Storck and Brook Riggio – Remember the n00b
19. JC Grubbs – Programming Apprentices
20. Brad Wilkening – Smart User Adoption Analytics
21. Jeremy Green – Gemlou.pe – Easymarklet and SimpleDB.

Reflection

The conference food was good. Today I looked for some practical after yesterday abstractness and I got it Popped out to Macys for a break and to buy some jeans.

Day 4 -Thursday

Last day a little bit sad so need something sweet..

How to talk to Developers

Ben Orenstein loads of energy and several lightning talks. Taught us all how to sing better, how to communicate better and pitch better.

Reflections on the scholarship

We met after lunch to discuss our thoughts and make suggestions for next year.  This was a really excellent opportunity for me and many of the other scholars thought so to.  We all agreed that we really appreciated the efforts of Ruby Central and the mentors/guides who took time out of their conference to make our journey easier and more useful.

Final keynote

Aaron Patterson was funny, sassy and even talked about rails. Lots of insight and advice. Some great stories of past mistakes, the need to consider what you publicize on security issues (tell the rails security committee and give them time to respond), how to avoid burnout, that we should look for happy moments.

The best keynote.

Aaron was born and raised on the mean streets of Salt Lake City. His only hope for survival was to join the local gang of undercover street ballet performers known as the Tender Tights. As a Tender Tights member, Aaron learned to perfect the technique of self-defense pirouettes so that nobody, not even the Parkour Posse could catch him. Between vicious street dance-offs, Aaron taught himself to program. He learned to combine the art of street ballet with the craft of software engineering. Using these unique skills, he was able to leave his life on the streets and become a professional software engineer. He is currently Pirouetting through Processes, and Couruing through code for AT&T. Sometimes he thinks back fondly on his life in the Tender Tights, but then he remembers that it is better to have Tender Loved and Lost than to never have Tender Taught at all.

There was an ice cream social.. and ice cream!

Reflections

I am without a doubt tired but the talks I went to did rally my energy, good choice of talks and speakers for the last day.

Evening

Explored The Pearl district. Lots of buzz, posh bars, not so posh bars and restaurants. For those who know Vancouver, BC it is like a more lively version of Yaletown.

Friday

I went home after buying more books from Powells and some DocMartins..

Thoughts and suggestions for next conference

This was a really good conference, with the exception of wifi access. The venue was really good with lots of space to either hide, code or meet people. The food was good everyday, very impressive for 1500 people .There were lots of amazing talks and a friendly crowd. I am very grateful that I won a scholarship to attend.  I wish to thank Sam, Miles, Chuck and Marty for making this such a great conference experience

These are just suggestions that may make it even better:

1. Have a day before the conference start, that is for beginners and newbies a bunch of workshops to get people up and running on rails an understand the basics.  Anyone can attend or not.
2. Ask every presenter to tag their presentation with Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced and maybe also type e.g. overview, into code, workshop. Allowing the attendees to choose smarter. Even give the option for speakers to give 20 second videos that state what they will talk about.
3. Have a local server with all the code needed for workshops, assume that the ISP will not provide, have plan B
4. Have a list of presentation mentors, who can support the building of presentations both for main conference and lightning talks
5. Have some advanced talks which they are presented on the web pre conference and the actual conference sessions get deeper or have debates..
6. Make fruit available through out the whole day, better to be fruit powered then fat sugar things
7. Give the opportunity for people to vote pre-confrence the sorts of talks that people would like to attend.
   This may encourage other speakers who know it really well to step up,  it would also give you trends of types people coming and may encourage others who are starting to get to know rails.. and possibly even deciding if this is the language that we want to use.  It would also allow people to start interacting prior to conference, maybe even setup lunchtime or dinner meet ups to talk about topics that will not be covered on the big stage?
8. Have some real advanced workshops that maybe take 3 hours to dive deep on something. We need to grow our experts to
9. Have a system to rate or vote for best presentation at the conference.

What did I get out of this conference?

Some awesome new people in my life, a bunch of new people to pair program with, a better overview of rails and ruby, a bunch of things not to do with rails. In some ways I have a treasure map of Ruby on Rails now with parts in detail and big gapping holes.. but I am in a far better place then pre-confrence.

Made some friends in Portland and got to know this city a bit better, ate some great food, bought jeans (my last pair had holes worn on the knees, ankles and crotch), bought books and bought some awesome DocMartins. And the need to get some physical exercise!

Holes in knees, ankles and crotch

I am super excited for the future

Last Thought

Straight from my cookie

Other awesome posts for Railsconf 2013

Amazing visual notes  -> https://projeqt.com/jessabean/sketchnotes/4/l

Awesome notes -> https://gist.github.com/jianxioy/5498969

Top 7 learnings -> http://www.hitthebits.com/2013/05/railsconf-2013-highlights.html

Jobs advertised -> https://github.com/blairand/jobs

Like this http://startup.stanford.edu but maybe it could be something better, that trains up developers into potential tech co-founders? Where they can build more then just a web app, with their best coding language, where they are prepared to bring other developers on board, where the basics of dev ops are discussed, when the architecture was thought through.  We seem to do a lot to grow our potential CEO/business lead co-founders, but what about the tech/dev co-founders?

but where are offerings in BC for technology? Most of these offering concentrate on finding the “right”  business model.

BCIT does great skills, but does not pull it together and UBC/SFU offers the theoretical, but not so much the architecture and how to make the technology choices.

First without a doubt subscribe to the Startup Digest

http://startupdigest.com

hacker news is very popular but it is a fire hose of information - http://news.ycombinator.com

Personal Blogs

Dave Mcclure

The street fighters of startups. Connected with 500.

http://500hats.com

Brad Feld

This guy is doing a lot to help us understand startups and the communities they need to exist. His blog is more personal , you feel like you know part of him and his journey. Connected with TechStars.

http://www.feld.com/wp/

Fred Wilson

A man with a lot of wisdom. He has built up an impressive community in which he engages. Connected with AVC.

http://www.avc.com/

Steve Blank

Occasionally has some really interesting posts

http://steveblank.com

Eric Reis

This used to be a really good site but now just feels like a marketing machine

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com

Knowledge Sites

InfoQ – I love InfoQ they have great videos, great tips on how to handle specific technical issues http://www.infoq.com

Smashing magazine – For design it is the king of the hill - http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Mozilla Developer Network - My favourite reference site for web stuff https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

W3Tech – Which technologies are in favour - http://w3techs.com

Ted.com – just in case you do not know – do not just watch the videos you thinking might be interesting, find ones that may challenge or add another perspective to your life.. http://www.ted.com

DZone – The odd good technical article - http://agile.dzone.com

News Sites

TechVibes – Great for Canadian startup news - http://www.techvibes.com/global

GeekWire - http://www.geekwire.com

Tech Crunch I used to read this but its re-design actually offends me - http://techcrunch.com

Community, Incubators and alike

Startup Weekend

Awesome fun for your weekend and a great way to find people you want to work with.

http://startupweekend.org

500 startups

The place for the scrappy startup

http://500.co

Techstars

The professional startup educators. Check out their online TV series “The Founders”

http://www.techstars.com

Y Combinator

For the elite and the top of the class

http://ycombinator.com

GrowLab

Accelerator based near the best boarding and skiing on the planet

http://www.growlab.ca

Angel List

For the startups look for funding

https://angel.co/home

Business Model Innovation Hub

Formed out of the Business Model Generation Book

http://businessmodelhub.com

Others

37 Signals

Signal vs. Noise – a company blog, which occasionally has really interesting articles.

http://37signals.com/svn

what if

Great nerd site - ANSWERING YOUR HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS WITH PHYSICS, EVERY TUESDAY.

http://what-if.xkcd.com

Who did I miss?

You see the format tell me who I should add, thanks

Getting Real -> Rework
Getting real was a good book to getting started, really from the perspective that you have all the skills and people already, it felt practical.  Rework was a updated version and it felt more abstract, more about the business then the product.

Top Lesson – get on with it and start simple

Four Steps to Epiphany -> The Startup Manual

This book really helped me do proper market research and how to do it. It is really a step by step guide in how to build a business around an idea.The updated book was much better designed and easier to read.

Top Lesson – don’t pitch but listen to the customer pains

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development

There is also a “cheat sheet” by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovites, I liked it because it was visually pleasing and gets to the point faster then four-steps and The lean startup.

Business Model Generation
Need to work how your business could make money, but not sure of which way to go. This book is an amazing and essential resource in establishing possible pathways. It also challenges you to stay flexible with business opportunities. It has some excellent real case studies in how to use this technique.

Top Lesson - Your business model should be a part of your daily thinking not lost in a 50 page MBA document.

Do more faster
This book was like having lots of friendly practical tips. The chapters are short and it’s useful as a reference for early stage Startups.

Top Lesson – Founders earn equality too

Web 2.0: A strategy Guide
This book was full of case studies of web businesses that we all know, it shows their journey and their strategies. It is helpful in helping you think through the big picture in terms in how you handle the market, competition and evolving customers.

Top Lesson – Stay flexible and be ready to adapt but do have a long term vision with game plan, in your head.

Start Small, Stay Small: A developers guide to launching a startup
This is a really practical guide to how to turn your website into a business. What are your first few steps.

Top Lesson - There are many paths to the same goal.

For the founder who concentrates on the business, money side, culture

Presentation Zen
You need to be good a telling your story, in a really simple fashion that all ages can understand. It helps you move away from bullet points to visual explanations.

Top Lesson – can you make this simplier?

Start with Why
This is an interesting book with a great TEDx video. It will encourage better pitches and storytelling and improve the marketing of your business and products.

Top Lesson - Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire.  And people follow them not because they have to; they follow because they want to.

Delivering Happiness

This is told from the perspective of one person and his journey to learn the importance of organization culture. Every behavior or interaction you have will set the foundations for your Organisation. If you bully your people will copy you and bully to. What are values and principles? This book will help you start this journey.

Top Lesson – Happiness never decreases by being shared.

For the founder is more technology focused:

The Art of Agile Development
A most excellent book with practical tips in how you can truly move in applying agile. This book uses xp programming as its pathway.

Top Lesson -Your software only begins to have real value when it reaches users.

Clean Code

This book gives a good description of clean code and how to achieve it in your own projects.It is based above some very clear principles and will help you think through the code your currently create.

Top Lesson - always commit better code then you have checked out.

Clean Coder
How good is your code? How professional are you really? Can you say no. Do you pass the buck? Are you accountable for your code.  This author puts the prefect model out there, which is a good start for a dialogue for what is possible.

Top lesson – You need to say no when you need to say no

For the founder who is design focused, UX inclined:

The Smashing Mag Books 1,2,3
Both the books and the website are an excellent for both designers and developers alike. A smart collection on web design principles. It’s a high-level view of user interaction information and has useful takeaways in each chapter.

A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making
A step-by-step guide to web development from proposal through wire framing to testing and launch.

Final Thoughts

Now go and build, create and show us your vision.

You want more -> If you want to see all the books I have read on startups have a look at my goodreads profile and my startup shelf

You could say I am trying to keep my options open, not for me, but the human race.  It could be the reason why I am politically liberal.  It is why I am respectful (to a point*) of all religions, philosophic beliefs, value sets, and political beliefs. Respectful does not mean I will also agree or that I will live my life in a similar fashion.

“As you think, so shall you become” Master Bruce Lee

The *”to a point” then becomes my filter: there are counter balances to my core belief (infinite diversity can lead to infinite possibility).  Here are some of them:

Respect for life

This may sound obvious, but I don’t mean just human, but also animals, plants and the planet we live on. It does not follow from this that I am anti-war – avoid it yes- but at all costs, no.  I personally would not tolerate Hitler or Sadam Hussain. If that meant I would have to serve, I would.

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world” Mahatma Gandhi

Equality of opportunity

I do believe in social justice, which for me means not to tolerate sexism, racism, or homophobia. It also means that we should have an excellent education and health system. Through this I would not want to wipe out the differences, for example between male and female gender, I love that we are different (and of course find myself occasionally frustrated by it!)  Our differences in all forms allow us to develop different art forms, innovate new solutions and discover something never personally felt. I believe effective education is the key to achieving ‘Equality of opportunity’ and it is also a key part of us all being personally accountable.

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” Ronald E. Osborn

A balance between the community’s  needs and the individual’s needs

I think the Libertian approach where people can do anything they want is not in the best interest for the human race or our planet.  I also think that Communism will fail unless you find a way for individuals to succeed and excel, whilst countering greed.  I also think Capitalism has many weaknesses. In terms of the divide between rich and poor, the wider it becomes the more likely there will be a revolution.  I believe their has to be a tax system that allows for a redistribution of wealth, allowing us to have ‘safety net’ to protect the poor and vulnerable.  This safety net should always where possible, encourage further growth and where possible not allow dependency. I do not believe that laziness should be rewarded.  That said for those who are successful should be rewarded for their efforts. Whilst capitalism does this through money,  I wonder if there are other models that might work.

“New ideas come from differences. They come from having different perspectives and juxtaposing different theories.” Nicholas Negroponte

Clash of Cultures..

I love diversity. I will not tolerate sexisim, racisim or homophobia. That said each characteristic e.g. gender or sex gives us each a different foundation to build upon, i.e. we are not all the same. This I like

I think immigration when not abused is a good thing. Its like having a good team: they are often comprised of very different personalities and approaches, when brought together well they will outstrip a team of clones.  Immigration in my head is just a macro version of this.  Most first world countries depend on immigrates to keep their economies competitive, maintain the skills/knowledge advantage and to do the jobs that first worlders no longer want to do. On a different but related note Immigrants have started nearly half of America’s 50 top venture-funded companies.

“We must stop telling foreign entrepreneurs to build their companies in other countries” – Mayor Bloomberg (New York, US)

Whilst I would love for us all to one day to have a common language I would not want us to only speak one language.  I speak bad English and even worse Spanish and both languages allow me to express myself in different ways. In a past life I was the Chair of the Cornish Language partnership as I held the belief, that the more languages a young child can learn, will give them extra ways express and create in, giving them more options in all things.

I worry when minority groups became overly defensive (i.e. adopt a siege mentaility) and exclusive (to themselves) rather then inclusive, as I see this can led to the inevitable decline of that ‘culture’. I will have to think more on this…

Respect for the ecology

No planet: no human race. I believe in the principles of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. I don’t own a car or a bike, I use my legs and public transport.

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”  Michelangelo

Think to the future

I am a strong believer that governments should think to the future.  This highlights one of the problems with democracy.  The election cycle often demands more short term gains by the voters and thus the politicians.  Innovation and taking some the risk out of innovation should be part of a government’s role. How? Now that is a debate I would love to have.. In the end if we are to survive as a human race I am sure that many of the petty differences that we currently view as so important will disappear once we come together as one human race. To do that we will have to tackle poverty worldwide, find solutions to shortages of food, water, power and education/health AND ‘get over’ nations. We after all live on one planet.. and eventually it will not be able to provide for us all, so we will have to expand beyond it and into space.

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” Wayne Getzky

Great advisers (that are different to their leaders) make great leaders

I believe the best leaders have great advisers (with different perspectives) who never get shot down for giving advice, the leader still chooses what to do.  Its no different for good people they are often surrounded with many friends who have different opinions who can always give advice to their friend.

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Sir Winston Churchill

The End..

Every week of my life has changed me.. my views will evolve as my understanding of others evolves.  I often debate or have great dialogue with those who once I disagreed with and occasionally my view will change and occasionally their view will change.  Together as  human race this is one journey of discovery and I am not sure we will ever find ‘perfect truths’ or principles that help us in every situation.

“Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which they were created.” Albert Einstein

The strongest names tend to be:

• Unique
• Easy to say(pronounce) and easy to write(spell)
• Easy to understand
• They tend to reflect Values or Benefits of the product not features, not sure of what FBV are? Look here
• Have emotion as they describe inherit values
• They may use words, with inherent trust in them, or coming a mythology already in place
• They may be counter-culture, to rest of their sector
• At least one noun

Things that do not matter:

Too many companies choose names based on what is available on the web.  URL vs Google search – in my humble opinion people rarely type in the URL bar, but instead will type the company name straight into their search engine (Google, Bing or Yahoo).

Corporate or product naming

Corporate branding – about the values, behaviours and thus culture of your organization.  So that you can attract the right talent to your organization.  In Simon Sineks’ book Start with the Why – people don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it

Product branding – All about your customers and their needs/desires.

An example from a startup weekend (54 hours – No talk, all action):

We wanted to build a tele-presence (e.g. you could control it from a web browser) robot (on wheels, inductive charging and video camera) that people were comfortable with having in their home, it would either check to see if their pet was ok, used to communicate with tech-phobic granny or sweep the house to see if all was good.  We felt the biggest market was to look after or checkin on either pets or grannies, our price point was $300. Women cared most. So I went to a dog park to see if small dog owners in apartment block inner cities would be interested.  There were more women the first morning, all small dogs, about half could not get home to check their pet at lunchtime and would then rush home after work.  They said “I would love to check-in with Frankly, he is so cute”. The term check-in appeared a lot in conversation.  However they did not like the idea of a robot, it felt too un-organic, but one suggestion was “well if it looked like a bear that would be cool.  So I started asking what animals people liked.. They seemed to reflect the movies of the time so, chicken, panda, penguin and monkeys.. so it made sense to call it ANIMAL + CHECKIN.  So I tried Chicken Checkin – people reacted with a surprise and then a smile (That is good). This played well with the audience would buy it for their grandmother as well (the grand daughters using their own or mothers money for their grand mother). I then used animal names people wanted most on the higher price scale, aspiration and all that. Chicken checkin as the cheapest base model, Chatty Panda for the good model (two way video conferencing) and periscope penguin (extendable neck – kitchen counter).

One other thing I knew the leading competitors at the start-up weekend – one was being led by a local Venture capitalist on home security – so i was guessing they would be going for rational proposition, a touch of fear (of home invasion), republican and money.  Another competitor was being led by a local Angel – another way to give money to homeless people, so very emotional, democrat, and fair.  In terms of name and brand I was looking for humour, clarity, independent, emotional but tying into common sense.  Essentially I was ensuring we would portray something very different in the pitch, not just in product but in style. It worked to a degree we won best presentation.

You can read the start weekend post here.

The importance of emotion

Every word comes with a meaning to a person, it may even not be about the word but the letters used.  They may not or love the name simply because of their history. People always come with baggage.

Literal versus abstract names – its on a scale

Personally I believe the more literal the name, the less education(marketing) will be needed for people to place you. And it is important(why psychology and memory) for people to be able to place/position you if you want mass market rather than just visionary buyers.

Comparisons

How would you choose a child’s name? Why do certain names mean more than others? We have a surprisingly amount of prejudices/emotion based on human names, often based on the first person we met with that name

Process

If you are finding difficult here is a process that may help you discover the name. This journey may help you explore more than just your name but your whole business. Its important to keep it separate from the design process.

Stage One: Research

• Know your shit – the business, the sector, the competition
• Know your values – a process in its self, which should really involve others
• Research your stakeholders – Porters five forces (Customers, Suppliers, Competition, New Entrants, Substitutes)
• Choose a perspective (Who are the first set of customers you want onboard, who will champion your cause – what is their psychological makeup? What words do they like and use)
• Your name is not alone – Type, colours, logo – will add clues to what you are about and can dramatically change the way words are perceived.

Stage Two: Get past the NOW

Sometimes people are so fixed about their idea, filter and prejudices that they cannot see clearly.  As the startup journey is very often emotional, it can cloud us from ration thought, which can be helpful.  That said a good name depends on having a strong emotional connection.

First Impressions

Get your team together and put the following questions on flip chart paper – give everyone post-it notes and a felt tip (it limiteds the number of words used) and describe:

Q1 – What do you(the organsation) do?

Q2 – How does your consumer/user benefit?

Q3 – What do you change in your consumer?

Q4 – Why are you unique? This one tends to get more bullshit answers than the others, be honest.

Q5 – What are your values and how does this reflect in behaviours and product/services? (If you are seeking actual behaviours then your values are not a reality, yet..) You should know this BEFORE you consider your name.

Everyone gets to put up there own views, no filtering or founder bullying.  Each idea should be discussed (people can keep adding) and grown. Brainstorming – not sure how? Have a look here.

Stage Three: Record the journey

Reserve a lot of wall space..

The Wall of Names – somewhere there should a wall of ideas, post-it notes with names, all are valid ideas. Each person would try to grow each idea, or help it down the evolutionary ladder. The more people you allow into the process the more ideas you will get.  This wall is not limited to words , pictures, sketches and photos are equally good.

The Wall of Customers (for product name) – the same as above but describes the customers you want. Their personalities, their drivers, fashion, music, everything

The Wall of Talent (for corporate name) – What are the types of people you want to attract? We all want smart people to work for us. But what kind of smartness? At a small business level your talent will be limited by the personality of the founder/leader. The unaware founder will want lots of people like them, but with different capabilities. The smart founder will be looking for different types of personalities as building a team is often about weaving, very different people together (as they all have different perspectives and will be able to see different problems and solutions).

Stage Four: Step out of your space

A fair degree of innovation comes from looking at other people doing other things, in other places and seeking what we can learn from them.  In part this happens so often that Michael Porter had two elements (Threat of New Entrants and Threat of Substitutes) in his Porters Five forces model to account for people who can come from another sector and replace what you are doing e.g. Apple taking over music and in part mobile.

Look at other organizations in other sectors (not your own) – which organization would you want to be from any sector profit, non-profit or governmental.  You are looking for the organizations that you admire and would like to emulate in some way.  For each organization breakdown why you like them, into values, people, products/services, get a little deep here, you are trying to truly see past the marketing/propaganda to see how they are connecting with you.

Unique possibilities

After you have reviewed the organizations consider what does not occur in your sector that already exists in another.

Stage Five: Deciding

Choosing a name is not an easy process.  Some people start with code names e.g. Project ALPHA, so they can just label it. Labelling is important for most humans.  If you are on a timescale I would suggest taking everyone out of work to start the above process, allow for no distractions, if possible get an independent to help facilitate the session.  They will concentrate on getting the best out of people in terms of ideas.  What ever you do always sleep on it.  The brain generally does some amazing stuff whilst you are asleep.

Names are like falling in love, you know it.  This can take time. Everyone will feel it.  That said even after choosing you may have doubts, thats ok.

The advocate – you will need at least one person to love the idea and explore its possibilities. Without a true advocate you do not have a good name.

Good places to think about it – Road Trip (with the team, not alone) you are together but in the real world with different stimulations, walk around a shopping mall, go to a conference about something you know nothing about, read an autobiography of someone with a completely different life to you. Lack of sleep can help Expose yourself to different forms of stimulation.

Good books

These books are not directly related, but each has taught me something with naming:

Sticky Wisdom – Understanding and growing creative cultures

Eating the Big Fish – About branding when you are the punk on the block

How to have Kick-Ass Ideas – Shake it up

Visual Meetings

Logo Design love

If you want to deeper into branding here are a couple other reccomendations

Designing Brand Identity 

Brand Sense

Brand Portfolio Strategy

I welcome your thoughts and experiences.  Where did your names come from?  What are your favourite names?

Bootcamp (Thursday night)

I loved the idea of the bootcamp, but we could not get down on thursday night.  In the last event I helped out with business model, marketing, wire framer and social media setup. This weekend I wanted to help out with front end web dev. The bootcamp offered the following:

1. Get your computer configured with all the tools needed to work collaboratively with your future team members.
2. Setup and configure a GitHub account with a skeleton project including:
3. App Engine – web framework with simple user accounts, database, and hosting.
4. Bootstrap – HTML design toolkit
5. jQuery – client side Javascript framework
6. Backbone.js – Rich application HTML5 framework

FRIDAY EVENING

Entering into the venue there was real energy, most people were up and talking to each other.  There was the fresh smell of pizza, beer and excitement, it was infectious.

Networking

I met as many people as I could without being rude.  Sometimes I forget that I have a British accent and I find that americans tend to listen to my accent more than my words for at least the first sentence.

Speaker – Matt Shobe CEO Big Door (@shobe)

Here are some highlights I took from his presentation.

1. Surpass fear (learn from everyone, the answer is yes to any reasonable request)
2. Successful teams (speed of execution, empathy, transparency (Good honest arguments))
3. Openness (No such thing as a private conversation with your customers, Admit your mistakes publicly)
4. Personality (The spirit of the people who created the product, find opportunities to high-five your customers when they succeed)

Preamble

The event was hosted by John Morefield (@jamorefield) and Shane Reiser (@shanereiser). There were about 36 designers at the event and 20% returning from other startup weekends. Ideas

So one difference at this event from Vancouver was that you had to put your pitch online.  I liked this, as it made it easy to track which ideas you like. There was about 50 pitches. The ones that stuck with me include:

• QR Codes for giving to homeless,
• Robots – Here is Justin’s initial pitch
• Writing community
• A wish list of places you want to go
• After party mobile app
• make the most of an event
• A mobile app to plan surprises for people
• Bus route app
• Web monitoring to provide affordable home security
• Superheros mobile app where you could conquer real life locations

The ideas were presented and we than got a chance to meet the pitchers and discuss further. I was looking for an interesting idea, but also people who would be fun to work with.  I wanted to avoid people who came over as too serious or who appeared to need to control. I also wanted to avoid ideas that had being researched in great detail, as then focus tends to be narrowed and there is less clay to play with (although they are more likely to win).  I did not care about how good a presenter the idea pitcher was.  We were given three votes.  After the vote 15 ideas remained.  Each pitcher got 60 seconds to tell us who they were looking for.

Deciding who to join?

1. QR Codes for homeless donations I really liked and they had a decent sized team.
2. Robots: the pitcher (Justin Wu) I had met during networking and I loved his energy but he had only two others on board, one tech and one interior designer.
3. The Surprises App had a really big team, maybe too big.

The Team In the end I decided Robotic team, as they had no business person (yes I wanted to code, next time), I had never worked on a physical product before and I knew I would enjoy working with Justin (he has sooo much of energy, and surprisingly he works at Microsoft!). We moved quickly to find the best location, a window for light, a white board and near where the food would be setup.. The team consisted of Justin @jzwoo (Microsoft engineer) – standing at the back, Guru (Microsoft engineer) sitting down on the left , Elijah (Interior Designer) hiding at the back on the left  and me (the nutter in red). Justin basically wanted to find a business model excuse for playing with robots!  We brainstormed use cases, the strongest seemed to be:

• Checking in on elderly parents
• Playing with your pet at lunchtime
• Security for second home owners or people who travel a lot

Getting to know Robots

Justin talked about the capabilities and what we would have to build ourselves.  From this we felt that an Open source robot operating system, with a modular chassis into which you could plug and play extra hardware and sensors. The intention was to allow the shell to be different shapes and materials. We also considered giving 1% of profits to WWF and modelling our robots on endangered species Making money with a consciousWe live on one planet when it’s done it’s done. So we considered what could we do sustainably. 100% Organic Polymers seemed easy enough. We debated the concept of Cradle to Cradle – essentially we take back your dead robot to recycle and reuse.

We broke up for the night and I started playing with some ideas for names, concentrating on the product rather than the company.

SATURDAY

Up early with the Dogs

In the morning I went to the nearest dog park to gut-check some early name and price points with the locals and to see if I could learn anything to help us. I learned that the most receptive target market was young, professional woman, who live in small apartments (especially tower blocks) and whose commute to work was at least 25 minutes.  The price point seemed to be under $300  I tested a number of names and found that animal concepts worked well, but that most women did not like made up names.  The name “Chicken Checkin” brought a number of smiles to people’s faces.  Pushing a bit further, most of the people I spoke to had grandmothers who they all felt guilty about not interacting with enough and that about 50% did not live anywhere near them,

Name

I sold the “Chicken Checkin” idea to Justin and the rest of the team as they came in, and updated them on what I’d learned. Justin worked on giving an us a set of robot feature set that would cost under $300. This was a product name only, the company name would be Life Style Robots.

Drafting the Business model

Version One Life Style Robots

I found some research conducted in Japan that showed elderly people preferred robots to look like robots or animals but not humans (maybe they watched Battlestar Galactica). Also women tend to care more for aesthetics of a device (and this was rise of designer weekend). So I played with some concepts and trialled them out on random women in coffee shops and fellow weekenders. I worked on animals that had fat bellys so to be able to accommodate the chassis.

• Chicken checkin – to be our cheapest option under $300
• Chatty Panada – Use an iTouch equip device and allow for two-way video and be under $600
• Periscope Penguin – To be able to see above a kitchen counter to be under $700
• Reaching orang-utan – with long arms

Mentors

So during saturday several mentors came over to ask what we were up to.  After describing our idea they would give their perspective. Early on some of the advice was tough to listen to as it was extremely critical.  Each of them had some really different styles.  The style that really worked was those mentors who owned their perspective and gave what they saw as our weaknesses with ideas about how we could overcome them. At some point on saturday we had two mentors come and give their perspective, both were pretty aggressive with their opinions.  Some of their advices was not helpful as they wanted a lot and we just did not have the resources (people to carry them out). We as a team felt really deflated.  Justin had being to a couple of events and he said he called this “Mentor Whip Lash” and his perspective was to take the good advice and follow our instincts.  Labelling it seemed to help. For the mentors that came after this, whilst we listened, and I wrote copious notes and then we also chose what to ignore and what to take on. NOTE – this is not say that the advice that was given was wrong, in some cases we needed to process it, others we wanted this to be our path, and not the mentor’s. That said mentors sometimes need to tell us the uncomfortable things.

Social Media

Facebook page is the easiest, least resource intensive way of getting a presence on the internet.  That said, you need 25 likes of your page before you can own the URL for the page. So my poor Facebook friends got spammed.. I asked some of the other teams to help out too. www.facebook.com/chickencheckin/

Mock design

Elijah (our interior designer) took the Chicken concept to heart and started to mould a physical mock-up.. Of course we are building a physical product! Clearly the egg came first.. Software

Justin and Guru concentrated on the software: in our perfect world we want to show the robot being controlled by a web browser or via smart phone whilst video chatting.

Who should pitch

Sometime during the day Justin said that his head was going to be in making sure we could present the robot and asked if I could present the pitch. I nearly said no but he looked stressed when I started to, so I agreed.  We talked about how to divide the pitch, I would get two and half minutes (out of four) leaving the rest for the robot. At some point on sunday one of the mentors check us out and the presentation and told us that Justin should pitch as does not sound “above the audience”. Sidenote – Over the last couple years US TV and film has put a lot of English people into ‘evil’ character roles. I wonder sometimes if is becoming part of the american psyche to assume that we are.  (Mwa-Ha-Ha-Ha-Haaah!!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2hmP8_mXUc&feature=related

UPDATES

During the day, teams stopped for 15 minutes to give each other updates with where they were, including accomplishments and problems.  Most teams stayed in the same space which kept the energy high.  I believe a couple of teams went to a VC’s office and another some other office space. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH9Gx_IdLic&feature=related

Drafting the pitch

So as the cards fell out, I ended up  building the presentation deck as I was the only one comfortable with design and presentation software.  So I built out the skeleton of what we need to cover. My process is to put down everything, work out what is missing, fill it out and then replace all the words with images.

Drafting Business Model Version two

Website

Saturday night I worked on the website as I was the only one with any front end web skills.  I did not finish it for the weekend.  I was looking for a playful style, that showed a prototype mentality. Its in HTML 5, Css 3 and Javascript so it may not work on IE9

SUNDAY

Concept diagram & logo

Elijah built a couple of concept diagrams so you could see our device to scale and then he started on a logo. Building the pitch deck

I pitched a couple of times to mentors and strangers alike. I am an amateur designer and would loved to have a graphic designer on the team to help me build out the visual story.. We got some good news the pitch length was going to be five minutes.  Now we could really cover the business model.

Business Model version three

At some point we narrowed down our target market to provide senior citizens with life style robots and dropped home security and pet care. Whilst they were nice additions there was no way I could sell all three markets in three and a half minutes. Better to focus. Guru pulled a competition analysis together. Elijah helped me pull out some more figures together and Justin gave us the final breakdown of components and costs.

Research

During the day I kept researching to find some real nuggets of information and to be ready for the Q & A. I think this is where our team size hurt us as if we had another person we could have worked out all the figures we needed for a professional, investor pitch. I went to a couple of stores to find some senior women (over 65) or women in their fifties (their daughters) to talk about our Chicken checkin. I spoke to five woman in their fifties, three out of five liked the idea, but on two occasions they were with their daughters (grand daughters) who really liked the idea.  Again, three out of five (woman in their 50s) did not live anywhere near their mothers. I had a great conversation with one elderly lady who frankly I wanted to adopt as my grandma! She had a great sparkle in her eyes and was very cheeky. Practice, Practice, Practice

I found a quiet spot and practiced my pitch out loud and timed it.  I was coming in at three minutes forty. I showed it to a couple of others in another group and got feedback. Later, I joined the locals around pioneer square, talking out loud whilst wandering around.  I even practiced my chicken noise with a homeless guy for a while. I got back to find the pitch length was back down to four minutes.. back to two and half minutes. I watched Mujtaba give his (it was very good for CloudSense) and I gave mine.  We gave each other honest feedback.

Err.. Snow in Seattle!

I love snow, trying to think about the project not skiing down a mountain Maybe we could put the robot on skis or a board and test it.. Pitch order and technical check in

About 4pm we chose our pitch position. Our team felt going near the end to help us buy more time to get the robot ready, so we might learn from the other pitches and be more likely to be remembered by the judges after 14 pitches (a lot to remember).  We ended up pitching last!

The other pitches It’s really hard to pay attention to all the other pitches, when you are waiting to do your own.  I think I watched nine:

• Iron Curtain was polished, this was led by Seattle venture capitalist Greg Gottesman, who also pitched.
• Street Code was powerful, this was pitched and led by one of the judges (Mike Koss who was replaced by Adam Philipp). They had two pitchers.
• Suprize had a lot of bumps but was immensely funny (in a good way)
• WhichBus was gorgeous

 Jenny Lam  Rebecca Lovell  Scott Rutherford   Adam Philipp

Our Pitch

I knew I had to bring the audience back to life after a long weekend and 13 other pitches and Q&A. I had to give them all the energy  I could muster (I was balancing my drinking of energy drinks with water), but being sensitive enough to feel what they wanted from me.  Our pitch can be seen (well just heard really) on Ustream http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/19798455 and starts at 45:20 it misses about 10 seconds but the sound quality is really good OR or you can see below on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2978E3H1cTU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNNpuR7mBEw&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL It starts with Chicken Checkin Screen and ends with Demo Time.. Sorry cannot get the slide show to exclude the other images.. I started the pitch with a Buuraaa ac (chicken noise).  A couple slides in I noticed a big spelling mistake in one of the slides (I changed the word right at the last moment).  I would have liked to allow some of the jokes to rest with the audience but I did not have time.  At the end of my section I asked the audience to cluck to encourage our chicken checkin robot to come out.  The audience was awesome! I am pretty sure I even heard a judge cluck  I then handed off to Jason at 2 minutes 40ish, to demo the robot.  Of course there were a couple technical hitches but we showed it working.

The Q & A

The judges were speechless. “The obvious question is… I guess there isn’t an obvious question….”  was tweeted out referring to Scott Rutherfords’ reaction (one of the judges).  I got asked some good questions and I gave OK answers, but I should have practiced this more. There were questions about the serious uses of the robot, what market validation had we done, an offer for help and the cost margins.

F*ck, we won something..The judges awarded five companies and we won best presentation and came third, prizes for which included:

• Some free time with Flow
• Some free time  User Voice
• A free pass to The Founders Institute

Iron Blanket (@Iron_Blanket)came out top with the best business model, followed by Street Code(@StreetQR_Code) with the best market Validation, followed by us (Chicken Checkin) for the best presentation, followed by Surprise with the best UX.  With honourable mention going to WhichBus for best design. More detail can be seen here on Geekwire.  For the other teams have a look here http://swsea.posterous.com/

Reflection:

We had to drive back to Vancouver, so we headed, straight after the event (with the snow we were not sure how icy the roads would be), so we missed the after party .  Mujtaba and I reflected on what we learned, how it was different from the Vancouver event, how are respective pitches went and what we would do differently next time.  It was at this point I noticed how HUNGRY I was, having not eaten since breakfast..  Junk food here I come..

1.  The size of teams

I think Iron Curtain had 14 bodies and Surprise was 13 bodies, having that many people really helps what you can deliver in a weekend. Clearly you need good leadership if your team is that big. At just 4 people we needed more people, but we did good.

2.  Graphic Designers and Artists are important 

We did not have a graphic designer, in fact 75% of team were engineers. Having that capability on your team will make such a difference in UX, branding and story telling. I need to find a way to recruit one next time.. Maybe show them a very badly drawn presentation that breaks ALL of the principles..  Just in case you want more proof, here are the sketches I did in my hostel for the pitch for the website (saturday night). 3.  Pre-weekend work

Both in Vancouver and Seattle it felt like, those that had some good pre-market research done before the weekend started. This gives a team a real edge, as it can be quiet difficult to do effective market research at the weekend.  Some people avoid their e-mail, some businesses are not even open, depending on the weather it maybe possible however to find people shopping, which gives the possibility of some direct marketing (face to face clipboard questioning).

4.  Accessible network

Having friends to help out to cover spots that your team is missing is really helpful, I saw this happen both in Vancouver and Seattle..  As well as having friends respond to your survey to get some serious validation. Maybe give some of your specialist friends a heads up and an offer for beer..

5.  Awards

Having the awards broken down into why they were in best was really good. However, there was a little confusion (and a lot of emails) as the judges did not state beyond best design, best UX, best presentation, best validation and best business model any order of winner(s). But this was cleared up after Geek Wire published an article declaring the winner – Iron Curtain (well done guys) and that the order reflected the position of the winners (reverse). We just have to work out how to reward developers with some credit now.

6. Pitching

I learned from my first startup weekend that you need to always focus on how, what you are doing is going to help the pitch. I think I took too long in letting go of parts of the pitch (e.g. the two other sectors – pet owners and house security), mentors certainly told me what to concentrate on, but on occasion I resisted (because targeting 50 year old women seemed a tough nut to crack and maybe not so fun).  I think my pitch was OK, but not brilliant.  Areas I could have strengthened it were in demonstrating the market validation and building out the finances. Maybe having that extra slide with component prices etc, ready for the Q&A.  And of course I should have practiced the Q&A with some of the team to be stronger on the answers. Don’t get me wrong I am extremely proud to be part of a team to win best presentation and win some prizes, I just want to learn and be better.

7. A place to reflect and share

As there was no online announcement, there was no place to see the final winners and prizes given. In additional people like myself write blogs, to reflect on the experience, process it and hopeful learn (and publicly show off our failures and successes).  It would be good to have a final page listing the winners, the final teams and who was in them (with contact details) and blog postings. On this occasion the GeekWire Article and the #swsea(twitter tag) became the informal places to carry on the conversation.

8. An idea? Angel List for Startup Weekends

It would be awesome if Startup Weekend started to keep an archive of all the startups, maybe even profiles for people who do it on a regular basis. Maybe even game it like foursquare? Maybe that could be my next pitch??

Other Perspectives:

After finishing this article I re-surfaced and found some other posts, have a look: Harmony Hasbrook  on the team “Hungry, Thirsty, Bored.” Dwight Battle on the surprise team. Paige Pauli on the WhichBus team. Katie Kuksenokon multiple teams.

[Update] Here is a promotional video looking at the Designer story.

BIG Thanks to:

A place to stay Not from Seattle I stayed in the Green Tortoise Hostel

The Venue - The Hub A great location, one BIG room. Thanks to Lynsdey  who was an awesome hostess.

The Startup Weekend Crew  Thanks to John, Sean and Ashley (@A6Hodgson) - You are a great waffle maker

The Food Was awesome, particular the Thai food on saturday night.

T-Shirts Thanks to Rohre from Five Bamboo for the T-shirts.

Extra Video Thanks @adamlovering for the extra video!