Free Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat Page B

time coding. He says his partners are relieved because they prefer to be working on the back end of the project.
    Keep in mind that you may not get everyone you want on your team. We try to bring together relatively equal numbers of designers, coders, and businesspeople, but we don't force people to join specific teams. Therefore, some teams have more than their share of one type of worker, and not enough of another. But that's just another challenge to overcome.
    What You Need—Talent and Energy
    Startup Weekend will help you learn the difference between what you want for your startup and what you need. You may want thousands of dollars, a legal adviser, a research team, and some gourmet food; however, you won't find any of those at Startup Weekend. But you will find what you need —talented, energetic people who are willing to adapt themselves to a project (and plenty of energy drinks).
    When it comes to finding the right people for your team, the Startup Weekend crowd can be difficult. It is loud and people haven't organized themselves alphabetically or categorically. But in many ways, the chaos that follows the pitches at Startup Weekend mimics the real world. How can you get yourself heard over the din? How can you convince the right people to join your team, even before you have funding or customers? You have to worry about winning them over—and not just as part of a big audience listening to your 60-second presentation. You also have to make the case to them one-on-one. It's the difference between auctioning off a date with yourself to any takers in the crowd and finding the person you'd really like to take to dinner and convincing him or her to come along. How do you get to “Great, pick me up at 8”? or, as you hear it at Startup Weekends, “Meet me at the whiteboard with your dry-erase marker and laptop in 20 minutes”?

     
    If you're an entrepreneur trying to assemble a team, you need to convince the talent to join you. Ask them questions about their vision for the project and what they can bring. Find out more about their background, and share more of yours. Give them all the relevant information they need to make a decision.

     
    Then there are those people who, though very passionate about their ideas, have difficulty when it comes to communicating them. Nick Seguin, Manager of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, says that while it helps for an entrepreneur to be driven, the passion is not going to save you if you can't get other people on board. If you're having trouble finding teammates, “you have to be able to extract yourself from the situation and figure out how to either (1) communicate the vision [more clearly] or (2) evolve the vision so you can get people on the same page with you.”
    As we noted previously, your idea will only be a portion of what attracts people to your company. It will mostly be because of you —their understanding of what it will be like to work for and with you. A number of the most successful leaders at Startup Weekend have told us that they never turn down an offer of help, and that a successful leader can find a place for everyone on the team. While this is not always true in the real world, at Startup Weekend people do generally come with useful skills and a willingness to work. That's why most attendees don't turn down too hastily anyone else's offer to join their team.
    Richard Grote, a startup veteran from Boulder, Colorado, said that Startup Weekend reminds him of working in his father's service station. “If you're standing around and not doing anything, he'll give you a lot of crap. So you just pick up a broom and start sweeping if you can't think of anything else to do. I think Startup Weekend is one of those places you just want to stay useful and busy.”
    Nicholas Gavronsky wrote about his experience launching a startup called Animotion at Startup Weekend New York