The third year of Atlanta Startup Weekend is less than a week away and begins Friday November 13th and goes through Sunday night. I am definitely biased as I have attended the last two Startup Weekends, but I strongly suggest attending if you are within the Atlanta area. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Startup Weekend is a 54 hour event where people with a variety of backgrounds — from legal to backend development — gather, pitch ideas and then take the selected ideas from whiteboard to working web application or whatever it may be. First timers can get caught up to speed here.
To date there have been well over 100 Startup Weekends across the world. That being said, Atlanta has been among the most successful cities of the bunch. Success defined as Startup Weekends that have had startups that are still under active development and have received some sort of investment: both Skribit and Twitpay fall into this category.
Early Startup Weekend and Skribit press that has been on my fridge for years
Atlanta Startup Weekend 2 was covered on CNN.com last year, with shout-outs to both aforementioned startups. Skribit was also covered in the Atlanta Business Chronicle shortly after the first Atlanta Startup Weekend.
Startup Weekenders having fun and watching clips from a commercial they were filming.
Building Community
Earlier this year TechCrunch brought attention to the work of two German bloggers that went through every Startup Weekend startup/project at the time to see how many were still alive and kicking. They found that only 12 of the 116 startups at the time were still considered active. That is mixed news - for one it goes to show that there's something in Atlanta if we can consistently push out active startups, and second, that Startup Weekends are more about meeting people and actually being able to build relationships with those people because you shared a weekend working with them. Before my first Startup Weekend, I knew very few people in the Atlanta tech community and that changed it for the better.
Skribit is the earliest Startup Weekend startup that's still going. (right click open link in new tab to see complete 2200px tall list)
That is all. Hope to see some of you out there. Of course I'm aware this blog has a pretty large reach outside of Atlanta so this and other local events I talk about aren't relevant to everyone. Thanks for reading anyhow!
More of my posts dealing with Startup Weekend can be found here. Have you ever been to a Startup Weekend? What do you think of the concept?