It's now the week after Chicago Startup Weekend. Now that I'm getting more than 3 hours of sleep a night, but am still full of excitement, I have some thoughts on the weekend that I'd like to share.
First--wow. Wow, wow, wow. What a positive, challenging, educational, fun experience. Positive because everyone in the competition was full of great ideas and infectious excitement. I met so many friendly, talented, diverse people. There was no cutthroat competition--even among the 13 teams, it felt like all the participants were in it together. Challenging because entrepreneurial thinking and execution, particularly when crammed into 54 intense hours, is an entirely different mode of operation than that of the academic world I'm immersed in. Educational because as someone with no technical skills and only limited experience in the world of startups, I did a lot of learning this weekend in feeling out the territory and figuring out how to contribute to the Edit Huddle team. And fun precisely because it was a giddy weekend of positive, challenging, educational activity.
As a relative newbie to all of this, I feel like I've stumbled into a whole new world. The best part of Startup Weekend is that it didn't really end on on Sunday night. Edit Huddle is launching beta testing this week, for real, and I get to continue to work with my awesome team members. What Startup Weekend most importantly taught me, then, is that what we and everyone else accomplished isn't confined to those 56 hours. The innovation, hard work, and creative thinking will continue. There's so much work to be done, and I feel ready to tackle it head on.
Stay tuned.
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