Startup Weekend Win!

Back in May I won startup weekend as part of the People Analytics team. The experience was exhausting and energizing. Here's a short recap:

Jay Beavers, Javiar Luraschi, John Rice and I decided to do Startup Weekend because we thought it would be fun -- and heck if we won and launched a startup that wouldn't be a bad thing either.

We brainstormed ideas individually beforehand so we could gauge our own interest in various areas. Javiar, Jay and I are engineers - John is a UX pro, so we brought different things to the table.

Startup weekend ran it's course with a few important milestones: we settled on an idea for retail analytics, we gained a couple of members, we talked to lots of potential customers, and we ended up winning.

While winning was nice, there were some important take home lessons from this event that I think I can sum up in one sentence:

Being honest with yourself about your expectations is a prerequisite for being honest with others with your intentions.

I'm still working on that.