THE WEEKENDERS
“People, it’s OK to think
big but act small.”
“Developers, man.
EDDIE AGUILAR
RICK BRANDLEY
“I feel like this
will be easy. I’m
super confident.”
TISA CAWTHON
“You got some
ideas? Throw
’em out.”
pursue the Silicon Valley
dream. His start-up idea
is a private social network just for families,
and he’s here to find a
team of engineers that
can turn his idea into a
reality. Like a true
leader, he’s even bought
Rockstar energy drinks
for the team to share.
He cracks one open. It
smells like cherry candy.
“Developers, man,”
he says with a slow
Parisian lilt. “They are
expensive.”
BASILE MICHARDIERE
The official Startup
Weekend road map, the
10-page entrepreneurial
instruction manual,
pushes its participants
to spend a lot of time
focusing on customer
validation. So Michardiere is crafting a survey.
On Sunday night, when
the teams will present to a
panel of judges, the judges
will want to know exactly
what market this new business will serve.
Right now, the time constraint is killing Michardiere.
“I am tense!” Michardiere
tells me, chewing on his fin-
gers. “I have to make it now.”
Teams will also be meeting through-
out the day with mentors and coaches,
a staple of the Startup Weekend experi-
ence. These mentors and coaches—a
mix of entrepreneurs, investors, and
business professors—volunteer their
weekends to provide everything
from strategic advice to emotional
support. Outside Startup Weekend, their
consulting advice could theoretically
cost hundreds of dollars.
Tisa Cawthon and her life-and-business partner, Lenny
Marut, are quick to show
off Cockroach Crunch.
As the game’s name suggests, cockroaches skitter
across the screen, and players
earn points by crushing them.
In 2009, the couple paid a
programmer $10,000 to build the game,
which they sold on i Tunes for $1 a
download. They admit they didn’t think
much about marketing. In fact, they
didn’t market the game at all. It tanked.
