Startup Weekend

Two Weekends Two Startups Part I

The following is Part I of the first guest post written by George Junginger and Doug Williams about their RTP and Columbus Startup Weekend experience.

Two Weekends - Two Startups - Too Much? Fun.

George Junginger and Doug Williams met at RTP Startup Weekend in July and continued their journey to Columbus a week later. If you followed the press that came from RTP, you may remember Doug from this choice bit of CNBC footage where he codes and sings at the same time. Doug blogs at igudo.com and George can be found @georgeju. They continue to work together and expect to participate in many more Startup Weekends in the future.

This post, the first in an upcoming series, is about the journey from SWRTP (credit) to SWColumbus. There will be a follow up posts comparing the cities, discussing what we learned and more.

After spending (what Startup Weekend claims is a mere, but we know better than that), 54 hours working on a company, we decided to try and do it all over again in Columbus, Ohio, the following weekend. Is Startup Weekend about community? Is it true that the journey is as important as the destination?

Why would you do this?
So, you spend all this time with a group of people – some lacking a few hours sleep, some who have donated brain cells to the great brewing tradition of the Midwest, and some just hitting a wall. Where this would cause a problem in any bar, workplace or church in America, it had absolutely no effect here. And you learned something amazing – that there are people here you could create a company with outside of SW. The stress, the excitement, the manic-depressive nature of starting a business – if you could hang with these folks through this tightly wound weekend, you could probably handle the ups and downs of a business that wasn’t started over three days. It’s kind of like a first date that goes on way too long. You are either going to never want to see that person again, or find out that you have so much in common, you want to go on another date.

Doug and George both chose dealcastr (deadpool) and spent hours working on the project. That day, Saturday, started at 9am. It would end at 4am for George and never end for Doug. At 11pm, Doug and George walked up the street to a bar for about an hour. That’s when they figured out that whether or not dealcastr made it, they could work together and create a couple of companies. After our speed dating session in RTP, the programmer with a marketer’s soul and marketer with understanding of technology needed more. We needed to know if the weekend was a lightning strike or if this was a long term relationship. So, what better way to test our confidence coming out of RTP than to head to another Startup Weekend?

The organizers of Columbus heard and were very excited that we were coming to their fair city. They started referring to us as the “RTP Startup Guys” which made us feel welcome. We tweeted across four states until we got there. They only failed us once, at 1AM, which was more Ohio’s fault than SWC’s (more on that later).

Again, one must ask why.
Why did we want to spend 10 hours in a car? We wanted time to talk ideas. We were jazzed from RTP and excited to get the same charge from Columbus. The time in the car was the bonus that offered us time to flesh out potential ventures we could share. If you don’t come from SW with a profitable venture, at the very least you should have a network. After an intense weekend, we had more intense time in a car, hotel room, another Weekend, not to mention the 10 hour return drive home. With little sleep, hard work, and no time apart - we didn’t kill each other! That’s how you spell Business Partner.

We left North Carolina about 3pm on a Friday. It had been a long day and our main goal was that we would have 8-10 hours to hash out all kinds of business ideas, plans, and what-ifs. We were both looking forward to it but had a challenge to overcome. You know that 3pm slump that hits in most offices? Well, looking at the drive at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, it hit big time. Our solution? Cook Out.

Now our friends outside of the South have probably never heard of this two lane drive-thru restaurant. They have something on their menu for only two months every summer that will have your head spinning faster than a Starbucks espresso. Yes, our ideas for the next few hours were fueled by this high glycemic treat – a watermelon milkshake. It’s exactly what it sounds like, chunks of watermelon, soft serve ice cream whirred in a milk shake blender. They keep whole chunks in the bottom which don’t get blended. And after one of those, it was non-stop idea time, until the sugar crash.

Talk is cheap. And free. Let’s make it pay off.
Any entrepreneur loves talking about their ideas, and we are no exception. This drive was a chance to play both evangelist and devil’s advocate – for your own ideas and someone else’s. And when you are doing that with a person whose insight and opinion you trust, you don’t mind them asking the hard questions, knocking down your assumptions and solutions. That is true partnership, true community.

After we had torn apart and rebuilt four companies, we were in West Virginia. Now anyone who reads People magazine or watches the news, knows that they absolutely must make a stop in West Virginia. Reason? Every Powerball lottery winner seems to come from there. The people in Columbus might be brilliant, but $1 into $140 million? – that’s better than cattle futures. Now West Virginia is a beautiful state to drive through and Starbucks has even discovered that it is part of the United States. Perfect timing as we were crashing from the watermelon milkshakes. Was it a sugar induced hallucination that showed gas was only $3.77 a gallon? George tried a Venti cappuccino, Doug grabbed a Red Bull, and yep, gas was still only $3.77.

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