This past weekend (Nov. 19-21, 2010) was the first ever BootUP Startup Weekend held at BootHK. And I think a small piece of history was created over the past 3 days.
We had a great show of about 20-25 people all eager to do a startup in about 48 hours. Anyone willing to give up their weekend in the current beautiful HK weather is a real startup badass to me and you can tell you had Hong Kong’s Silicon Valley-quality entrepreneurs in the first 3 hour brainstorm session.
Everyone in the group threw up ideas on the whiteboard and then each person chose 3 of the startups they most wanted to work on – I think within an hour we had 40 amazing ideas – but with 20 people participating we concentrated on the top 5 ideas and had 8 start-ups present to the group on Sunday night. Each startup had about 3 people with 1 team having 4. It didn’t matter if you were a designer, a programmer, a fund manager or a tech geek – everyone had a common goal and that goal was exceeded in my mind by 6pm Sunday evening.
It seems everyone who participated had zero to low expectations of what this event could be – how dare they! We brought 400+ people to Cyberport for Startup Saturday in August 😉 – but its the first time this had been attempted in Hong Kong. Huge kudos to Jon Buford of BootHK who had the vision and the passion to pull together a great group of people that all wanted to create something exciting! I was merely the MC of the proceedings and was truly impressed with the quality of the people and the quality of the presentations presented in only 2 days with some teams having to pivot on the last day because they found out their idea didn’t work or that they weren’t all on the same page – exactly what would happen in a full-time start-up!
I’m not going to list the startups just yet, only because I think they had great ideas and want to give them time to polish it although one of them has already submitted an iPhone app to the App Store so that will go public in 2 weeks and which we will talk about in more detail – but all of them have said they will continue to grow after this initial weekend and we will have them present again in the New Year.
- So congrats to Jon Buford and Boot HK for fulfilling one of its early promises.
- Congrats to the brave people who came out and put amazing presentations together in such a short time.
- I leave you with this photo album of presentation night last night!
- Stay tuned to StartupsHK.com and Boot.hk for the next Startup Weekend event.
Have a great week!
Read Jon’s more detailed post here: http://boot.hk/bootup-10-lessons-learned-from-hks-first-star
