A text from Matt McGunagle: “Hey man, Startup Weekend is coming up in a month, and Google is hosting it! You should buy a ticket and come.”

“I don’t know, its the first weekend of school, I’ll think about it…”

“Ok, let me know, we can carpool.”

//minutes later…

“I’m in”

Little did I know what that weekend had in store.

For those who do not know, Startup Weekend is a weekend long event where a crowd of entrepreneurial spirited people gather, form teams, and compete. Through the course of the weekend, teams work to perform market research, create a business model, and build a product / prototype. On Sunday evening, each team gives a 5 minute pitch to a panel of judges – the grand prize for this weekend: $20,000 of resources and lots of Google swag. The real prize this weekend: collaborating with a diverse group of 8 wonderful people (http://billninja.us/). Oh, did I mention that every meal was fully catered, Google style (:

The amount of learning that takes place in those seemingly short 52 hours is not easily conveyed in a blog post. What I can explain though, is that during those 52 hours, I slept for 9, I at for 3, and I learned through direct involvement with all aspects of this venture for the remaining 40 of them. I’m not sure if that number means much, so to put this in perspective: a typical 4 unit course gives you 40 hours of class time. So in the same amount of time we spend in class for an entire quarter, I was immersed in business development, mobile development, back end server development, market research, networking, and much, much more. If that sounds at all interesting or valuable to you – come to a CPE meeting. Events like this happen all the time, and we can help you not to miss out.

I could ramble on and on about the experience, but I would rather you finish reading this post, then stop halfway through. So, if you have any questions, comments, or just want to chat – send me an email at tssweene[at]calpoly[dot]edu, I would love to hear from you.

–Tim