Startup Weekend San Antonio

On May 16-18th 40 peo­ple gath­ered together to cre­ate 3 com­pa­nies from scratch. It’s a new phe­nom­e­non that is sweep­ing the nation: Startup Week­end. It was cre­ated by Andrew Hyde in Boul­der Col­orado with events held all over the coun­try and Canada.

I knew some of the folks who had thrown Startup Week­end Hous­ton in Sep­tem­ber 2007 and heard more details about the expe­ri­ence from Erica O’Grady at Bar­camp San Mar­cos in Octo­ber 2007. I imme­di­ately thought it would be a great con­cept to bring to San Antonio.

I started dis­cussing this with my net­work of pod­cast­ers, entre­pre­neurs and social media folk to gage the level of inter­est. Todd O’Neill, Orga­nizer of Co-Working LaTaza, sug­gested the per­son I needed to con­nect with was Dean McCall of Idea­gin. Todd intro­duced us on Twit­ter, we met in per­son at First Fri­day Co-Working at Fire­cat Stu­dio and Dean jumped aboard. Since it takes a team to make first-time events like these hap­pen, Dean knew that Celeste Diaz Fer­raro was the per­fect per­son to round out the Startup Week­end San Anto­nio Organizers.

Erica O’Grady, of Peanut But­ter Media, was Startup Weekend’s Rep­re­sen­ta­tive and helped us kick off the amaz­ing 2 1/2 days of fun. She was phe­nom­e­nal! Hav­ing been at the Andrew Hyde’s first ever Startup Week­end in April 2007, attended four other week­ends includ­ing orga­niz­ing the Hous­ton event she was the per­fect per­son to offer her soft guid­ance through­out the weekend.

Twenty-one ideas were pitched and by the end of Fri­day night it was nar­rowed down to three:
iDre.am: A dream inter­pre­ta­tion site
ForceX­change: an auc­tion and com­mu­nity site for folks in the secu­rity forces from bor­der patrol to mil­i­tary
RentEscapes: a sec­ond home/vacation home com­mu­nity site.

By day two, with com­pany names cho­sen and domain names pur­chased the pro­gram­mers were busy cre­at­ing the archi­tec­ture for the sites. Those not pro­gram­ming bus­ied them­selves with logos, busi­ness plans, mar­ket­ing plans, video script­ing, social media strate­gies etc…

The San Anto­nio Tech­nol­ogy Cen­ter was abuzz with all the plan­ning but there was time to wind down with after­noon chair mas­sages and evening musi­cal enter­tain­ment by Matt Barker.

On Sun­day morn­ing although folks were sleep deprived they were still ener­getic and ready to see all three com­pa­nies launched. Philip Wheat of Microsoft stopped by on Sun­day after­noon to give away good­ies from Halo 3 Xbox games to Vista Ulti­mate soft­ware. By the time it was all said and done two out of the three com­pa­nies had live sites: iDre.am and ForceX­change RentEscapes has plans to launch within 30 days, are stay­ing in touch with one another and have had sub­se­quent meet­ings since Startup Week­end San Antonio.

Over­all, I would say my per­sonal expe­ri­ence with Startup Week­end was a com­plete suc­cess. I met some of the most inno­v­a­tive, entre­pre­neur­ial and tech savvy folks in San Anto­nio. Not to say there were only San Anto­ni­ans at Startup Week­end. There were folks from the Rio Grand Val­ley, Austin, Hous­ton and Raleigh, NC. I’ve made some fast friends that I will stay con­nected to via Twit­ter and Skype.

Where do we go from here? All three teams are mov­ing for­ward with their respec­tive projects. I’ll keep you updated as things progress. As for Startup Week­end San Anto­nio, we’re field­ing requests from folks who were unable to attend but caught the UStream of the fun. I’ll be meet­ing with Dean and Celeste later this week to recap the event and dis­cuss when to hold the next event.

Tags: San Antonio, startup weekend, startup weekend san antonio, swsa, texas