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Boulder Startup Week Begineth!

Thumb upBoulder Startup Week is this week. If you haven’t been, it’s a great opportunity for a number of reasons. You can get a flavor of the Boulder tech community (though it’s worth remembering that there are numerous firms that don’t play in the startup world that are in Boulder). You can learn a lot about startups from folks who are actively building one, or have built one in the past. You can learn about new technologies and trends that are up and coming, including data science, blockchain and cannibis. And you can meet a lot of great folks.

I’m a bit burned out on startups at the moment, but am still planning to attend a few sessions, mostly on the development track. I’m especially excited for the Boulder Ruby Meetup on Wednesday, where experts will speak about interviewing. I’m also speaking at a session on hosting.

My tips for Boulder Startup Week:

  • go to at least one session in a different area of focus than you normally would.
  • arrive 5-10 minutes early and plan to stay 5-10 minutes after. Use this time to chat with folks. (This is hard for me, but I’ve found that having a canned opening line like “what interesting talks have you seen” or “is this your first time at BSW” is a good way to break the ice.)
  • the above tip will prevent you from trying to attend too many sessions back to back to back. This is a Good Thing(tm).
  • bring business cards, or prepare to exchange emails.
  • thank a volunteer and/or sponsor when you see them. There’s a tremendous amount of effort that goes into this week.
  • be prepared to help someone you meet out, with an intro, feedback on an idea, or even just an interesting article.
  • if a session is full, I’d get on the waitlist and then I’d show up anyway. Because every session is free, I’ve found that oftentimes folks are … over committed and there’s often space for other people.

If your interest has been piqued, please check out the schedule. Hope to see you out there.

What can you cut out?

Fractal image
Perhaps we could have made the site map a bit simpler?

“I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal

I was a mentor for Go Code Colorado over the weekend (mentioned previously). It was a good experience. About 10 teams, 30 mentors, and a couple of hours. I had a lot of fun chatting with the teams, which were all using open data provided on the Colorado Information Marketplace to build an app that will serve a need. They divided the mentors up into functional areas (data science, marketing, developer, startup vet, etc) and let us wander amongst the teams. Sometimes I felt a bit useless (one team was trying to debug a Meteor app that would run locally but failed when deployed to a web server) and other times I felt like I was a bit of a bother (since the teams were also trying to get stuff done while being “mentored”). But for the most part I had interesting conversations about what the teams were trying to accomplish and the best means of doing so from a technical perspective.

One thing that came up again and again was “what can you cut out”. The teams have a fixed timeline (they are only allowed to work until the final competition in early June) and some of the ideas were pretty big. My continuing refrain was:

  • capture all the big ideas on a roadmap (you can always implement them later)
  • cut what you can
  • build a basic “something” and extend it as you have time
  • choose boring technology

For example, one project was going to capture some data and use the blockchain for data storage. I totally get wanting to explore new technology but for their initial MVP they could just as easily use a plain old boring database. Or frankly a spreadsheet.

Lots of developers don’t want to hear it, but when you are in the early stages of a startup, technology, while an important enabler, can get in the way of what is really important: finding customers, talking to them, and giving them something to pay for.

PS This is a great read on all the hardships of building a startup and how it is so so so important to minimize any unnecessary difficulties.