Jennlog

When I heard that Andrew Hyde had come up with the fun and crazy (a good crazy) idea for Startup Weekend I immediately knew it was genius — and Boulder’s tech/entrepreneur community has signed up with its full support.

Andrew’s plan is to take 50-60 techs, hackers, designers, programmers, user experience folk, lawyers, venture capitalists, jacks of all trade and cooks and lock them in a room together for a weekend with an idea. By marinating everyone’s brains together from Friday at 6pm until Sunday night at 10pm, the goal is to have a company with a product and strategy by the end.

Boulder has a really active community of tech entrepreneurs. Boulder’s OpenCoffee is amongst the largest OpenCoffees around the world. The Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup group has almost 500 members. There’s also the Boulder BarCamp, which has happened twice. Combine all of the people with a bunch of smart startups and a few venture capital firms and the result is pretty cool.

It feels a lot like what my friends had in the Bay Area in the early-mid ’90s and we didn’t have in Toronto, where I started my first couple of Internet companies. I’m energized by everyone around me and I’m thankful to be a part of this community. See you at Startup Weekend.

For the last two weeks, I’ve made a concerted effort to escape the Yallery.com development hovel to meet local technical, entrepreneurial and VC/angel people at various events. My first one was the Boulder BarCamp on March 31st. Then there was the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup on April 3rd (I may be presenting Yallery at the May meeting at the Denver Art Museum).

Today was the inaugural Boulder Open Coffee Club (here and here) group meeting. Created by Jason Mendelson, after an idea by Saul Klein, this group brings entrepreneurs and VC/angel investors together at informal caffeine-fueled meetings around the world. I met some really neat people today. I’ll be at the next one in two weeks.