Jeff Beard

Put a team of professionals in a room together for a weekend and see if they can produce a functioning, viable business by Sunday night.

I think it’s a wild idea and certainly gives me something fun and interesting to do this weekend so I signed on for Startup Weekend. Boulder is a fantastic place for startups for a number of reasons and
there have been many that have meet with great success. One of the reasons I believe that there is, literally, a sub-culture of startups here is the amount of talent in the Denver/Boulder area and a lot of those
folks have signed on which is really the appeal for me. I love working with smart, motivated people and I hope I can provide some value to the team.

Startup Weekend takes the concept of an incubator/accelerator and compresses the time line. A lot. But
ultimately I think it’s a low-risk approach that has a lot of potential turn out something valuable even if the business that it launched on Sunday night doesn’t live up to our expectations. We learn and maybe do
it again some time.

The business ideas look promising. Here are some of the ones I liked:

1. Googlodeon
   - I have two small children one of which can sort of use the computer
   and one who really wants to. The big Elmo icon on the desktop works
   well to get them where they want to go. I really like this idea from
   Dave Duey. So maybe large easy to understand icons would allow the
   kiddies to get to where they want to go. This could be a custom meta
   tag that a browser plugin uses. I think it merits more discussion.
   Remember, if there’s a hook that will get the kids screaming for
   something, there’s a hook to get Mom and Dad to get out the checkbook.
2. There is a recurrent theme around irrelevant or unwanted content from various
   sources and how to manage it. Ryan H, Steve Webb, Josh Fraser, Jenn and
   myself (in Big Idea 2) have all put forth ideas that I think ultimately
   address the same issue. I think the key is allowing users to define for
   themselves what’s important, what’s not, and what’s crap (like web
   spam).
3. There is a personal event reminder service introduced by
   David Cohen and discussed by Ryan H, Justin Shacklette, Andrew
   Kavanaugh, Jeff Ledoux, and others. I had this idea a while back too. I
   must have been standing in line at the florist at 5:30PM Valentine’s
   Day thinking “hey, the world needs www.dontbealoser.com to remind me
   ahead of time to take care of business”. So I like this idea. I also
   agree with Tomas that its been done but has it been done well enough?

I of course like my other idea about the real estate platform. There’s a
lot going on in the space but I think the non-broker angle as well as
putting applications on people cell phones hold enormous potential. The
key being the domain model which transcends the traditional real estate
vertical.

Anyway, this is going to be a lot of fun!