I’m really excited to participate in StartupWeekend in Hamburg tomorrow, where 140 people will come together to build two web startups. The whole progress is crowdsourced - attendees are invited to pitch ideas, then two ideas are selected and developed over two days in teams that cover business and finance, programming, graphics, marketing and legal aspects.
At the end of the weekend, everybody becomes a shareholder in the companies, and management will be elected, which will receive a little seed funding to hopefully get off the ground. I’m moderately skeptical if this will work, but can’t wait to find out! Now on to contemplate about startup ideas… 
Update (05/19): Hey, my idea made it into the top 5! These are the two final projects:
- indawo.de, a platform that helps event organizers to find suitable locations - for both corporate and private events such as weddings.
- lockerlernen.de, a community for tutorial videos targeted at pupils, where I took care of the video portion.
In the final meeting, indawo.de was chosen as the project that will be incorporated with a 60:40 vote, and everybody that attended is now a shareholder. lockerlernen.de was not short of praise and the team members are looking to incorporate it as well.
Programmers and graphic designers were incredibly scarce, so the implementations are at a very early demo stage. Most attendees are now back at their day jobs, but each project has a committed core group that will hopefully drive these projects forward in the nexts months.
I learnt a lot about crowdsourcing today. While I often felt that the sheer number people was slowing things down considerably and there were many disagreements, we ended up with two ideas that I can see surviving. Thanks a to the organizers Cem and Jason for pulling this off!
