ColinAke.com…until I write a book.

Yesterday I blogged about CloseBuy.me, the project I worked on at Atlanta Startup Weekend. I didn’t talk about much else… Today I’m going to break down what I took away from Atlanta Startup Weekend, as suggested recently in Skribit (by the way, use it if you want me to blog about something).

First - Atlanta has a great entrepreneurial community. Debate that if you want, and people will, but I think that the people make the community. Everyone’s approachable. Everyone makes an effort to help out. Everyone has their own opinion, and it’s respected. People are accessible - I met most of the community at BarCamp (or I still haven’t met them yet) and I feel at home and welcome in the community. No, we may not have the track record of the larger communities, but there’s a ridiculous amount of talent in Atlanta that I think will serve the city well over the coming years.

Second - Working with motivated people motivates people. It’s a drag to walk out of Startup Weekend - where you’re working on something with extremely motivated people - and go back to your ‘normal’ job where it’s really hard to get pumped up about something. You’re not sitting in a conference room bouncing ideas off of very smart people. It’s demotivating. It makes me want to work with motivated people. For the first time, I really became interested in coworking.

Thirdly - Short Term Success != Long Term Success. Our project is one that works - it has a prototype that works. It was “successful” in that the team stayed together and worked together. It is not a success as a startup. It’s nowhere near. What happened over Startup Weekend is a good basis for a platform, but most likely we’ll have to rebuild the code entirely, spend more time thinking about how things operate, and completely start over. Just because we were able to present a demo does not mean we’re successful. It means we now know more about what we don’t know. I now realize that I have so far to go before true success.

I could go on. (97% of) the people impressed me. Atlanta Startup Weekend encouraged me to take the leap and work on my own startup out of college. I learned a bit about when to try and lead and when to step back and let others do their thing. I saw firsthand how projects either fail or morph into “something that works” when a short amount of time is involved. I learned how to not compete against other projects and support them instead. I’m looking forward to seeing how bad my public speaking is, thanks to the video footage of the event. I’m sure I’ll annoy myself as I watch me.

The result of the weekend, to me, is far greater than just a few product demos and a few “failed” projects. Any one of the “successful” demos could fail at any time. The result of the weekend is a closer knit community - a more motivated community bringing in new people to focus on building businesses in Atlanta. The result is motivated individuals going back to their own lives and being unsatisfied with mediocre effort.

To the Atlanta startup community: If I can ever do anything to help out on a project you’re working on, let me know. If I ever do something that is annoying / stupid, tell me to my face. I want to improve as a person continually. I want to contribute to the community.

Colin