StartUp Weekend Calgary 2011: My start on the StartUps. Part 1

Posted in Calgary Start Up Weekend, Entrepreneurship, StartUps

It is really hard to tell how I came to know about the first edition of StartUp Weekend Calgary.  I was at the office taking a glance to things going on during the weekend and somehow I stumble upon it.

I did not think too much, I was looking for learning experiences, getting my mind ready for starting my own business full time and extremely bored with all the routine going on at the office.  Some people might think that having a job that somehow includes taking photos of models and turn them into ad campaigns is not at bad job at all, but trust me after 7 hours of removing expression lines, increasing some natural curves and decreasing others, you start craving for something more challenging, real and exciting.  StartUp Weekend Calgary was the perfect fit.

I did not read too much about what a StartUp Weekend means, how it works and what am I supposed to do there, I just made a quick mental calculation, I will be paying $100 dollars for a 54 hours hand on workshop about how to start a business and what entrepreneurship was about, that comes to less that $2 per hour, sounds good, but it got event better when I knew they will be providing breakfast, lunch and dinner, uhm… this is a good deal. I was paying $60 just to listen to Malcom Gladwell for one hour (totally worthed), why not  $100 for getting right on what I really wanted to do, start a new business. I just jumped into it, and did not think too much the rest of the week.

Friday 4;30 pm, time to scape the office!  Despite it was rush hour somehow getting to CoworkYYC was not complicated. It is always a pleasure to go to Inglewood, but this time I had more good reasons than visiting stores and wondering around coffee shops, this time it was business!

Just arriving, I noticed the room was full with people, I could see the archetypical sellers and mindless networkers (I learned to smell them a mile away, and luckily they were gone by the end of the night and never came back).    At the other hand there were other group of people I’ve never meet before, it was the kind of people ready to make a difference on their lives, they came together because they were looking for something more challenging, real and exciting.  They were like me in spirit, but there were two fundamental differences, they had an idea of what StartUp Weekend Calgary was about (in my world reading instructions is cheating) and I was the only designer in the room.

By the time everything started, I was wondering if I put my self in a similar situation than the time I went to an underground rock goth bar wearing a light blue sport suit; it was ok to be there but I had to pay lots of attention to what was going on and learn fast.

To be continued…