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 Andrew, how did Startup Icon get started? 
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Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:53 am
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How did you get this idea? And what did you do to get the wheels rolling? As we stand poised on this, the start of our second awesome season...


Thu Feb 07, 2013 11:22 am
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Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:57 am
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:ugeek:
Ron,

I was at a breakfast meeting hosted at Stanford in Oct 2011. I was making small talk with someone and made an off the cuff remark: "Wouldn't it be cool if someone did a virtual pitch contest". The person I was talking to (who is normally very prim and proper in a Lady Di kind of way) she came unglued. I literately saw goose bumps pop up. I really did not fully understand what I had said or what the ramifications meant. So we explored them over the next few weeks in meetings and I had to solve their questions and issues that came up like - "When we bring you over 5,000 startups, how are you going to vet them and find the cream of the crop in just a few weeks”. After thinking about it – I’m not, we do not have the staff to properly pull that off, so the answer became we have to find a way to “Crowd Vet” them. To me that meant we needed to reward the crowd in some way. That meant gamification. Then I asked myself, if we are going to reward the crowd for vetting the Startups, what else could we reward them for? That answer was simple and natural – reward them to 1) sign up with the startups, 2) Try out the product and provide feedback (meaning they really tried it) 3) bring their friends to the startups they liked. That just seemed like the natural thing to do. And from there, the event just kind of built itself based on what is good for the Startups, Judges and Users – the whole ecosystem. I posted a PowerPoint on Slide Share.net on Thanksgiving showing what we wanted to do and it blew up. We then launched at SxSW in March. So from concept to event in 5 months over the holidays.

:mrgreen:


Fri Feb 08, 2013 11:54 am
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Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:53 am
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Awesome! That's a great story, and it is a great idea... there's wins for everyone involved. Next question of our impromptu interview here, how did you build the team? Who did you bring in, how did you meet them, what happened then?

:D


Fri Feb 08, 2013 12:09 pm
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Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:57 am
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:shock:
Wow Ron; that is a long list to thank everyone that was involved, probably too long for this forum. I will go over the highlights. Building the team basically was an act of building a “Coalition of the Willing”. The main person that help put everything together for Season 1 was Greg Weinstein. He acted as Project manager, Director, all around tech and recruiter for technical help. He recruited many great volunteers that helped out with Season 1. Then as we built the studio at Hacker Dojo, more people chipped in to help because they saw it as a great project that was both fun and cool. I knew Nolan Bushnell from years ago when he wanted to buy my team for PlayNet (long story for another time), so he was the first Judge I asked to join. Then I met Bill Reichert from Garage Ventures at the Dojo, told him what we were doing. He liked the idea and decided to Judge as well. With them on board other Judges filled the slots. Our 64 Startup Bracket has 124 Judging Slots which in Season 1 we filled with 47 different Judges.

Then as we were launching Season 1 at SxSW, I ran into the legendary “Fat Man” George Sanger. We had met years ago when I was doing some VR Arcade machines. I told him what we doing and he said he just had to be a part of it. It is great to be a part of such a powerful and compelling event people like George, Nolan and Bill want to help make it a reality.

So once we completed Season 1, Joe Asiala of Confluence Ventures and Kevin Blaser of Blue Water Angels sequestered us for a week in Silicon Valley do debrief us and find out what we learned. After that we took 2 months to develop the plan for Season 2. We decided on the Reality TV addition to the event and got a producer on board. With that we created the new goal of getting 1 million users for 10 of the Startups. We then took that to Tim Draper and got him and Draper University on board. Since then we have gotten ooVoo and a few other sponsors to help us achieve the new goal.

But in reality we need everyone’s help to try all the new digital products we bring you in the Starting 64 and bring your friends to the ones you like. Because the only way we can achieve this goal and help these Startups is with the home audiences’ help.


Mon Feb 11, 2013 5:44 pm
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