Startup Weekend is the concept of a group of folks interested in starting a startup coming together for a weekend to create a company with a product, marketing, business plan, etc. While there  are some interesting things that can happen in this space in terms of community, I want to focus on the outcome, where there are so many pitfalls along the way that a successful company is an impossible result.

  • Building the company around the product.  With the startup weekend, the group decides on a product to take to market, and is off and running.  In doing so, the company becomes about the product, and the success / failure of the product dictates the success / failure of the company. The company isn't the key outcome, but merely the vessel to bring the product to life. As a result, not enough time is spent forming the Raison d'être for the company. Then, even if the company were to succeed on the product, they would find themselves tied too tightly to the product to branch out.  A company that builds its own core first will be better poised to recover from initial failures, or too build on successes, because it's not so tightly bound to it's great product idea, but rather the idea of what the company is about.
  • Too many cooks. Startup Weekend results in an ownership nightmare. Everyone knows the optimal number of founders for a startup is 2.09.  Startup Weekend will result in a number of founders an order of magnitude greater. Moving forward, this causes big problems in terms of financial incentives for the founding team, due to initial dilution before any further dilution from outside funding . Furthermore, on it's own, the large number of founders would be viewed as a negative when seeking VC funding.
  • Built-In internal conflict. Startup Weekend brings together oil and water and then shakes it vigorously for the first 72 hours. Given enough time, the divisions do reappear. By bringing together folks interested in Startups, it's a safe bet a large number of them grok Capitalism.  By putting together a community building weekend, you will have folks more interested in that community and keeping everyone involved. As the business moves forward, the "cut-throat" business concerns and the "community" goals will conflict, as was seen in Boulder.
There are other conflicts that can and will arise.  Folks with different backgrounds will get together and vote on a direction. When the direction hits a snag, the dissenters will start to fracture with the group.  In the Boulder Startup Weekend, this happened when the Java prototype took too long, and a team of Ruby devs attempted an end-run around them.

Startup Weekend is an interesting concept, and it probably can do a lot for building the local startup community, but the deck is stacked against any kind of viable company resulting from it.