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.