54 hours to send out ideas, join a group, create a product and then present it – welcome to Startup Weekend. When I heard about it I decided to sign up because it sounded like a lot of fun. I’ve worked in many a startup and I always loved the frantic pace of crunch time (I’m not sure what that says about me… but let’s leave that aside.) My decision was confirmed when I found out that my clients, Platonix Joint Ventures, would be a sponsor and participating in the event as well.

It was so much fun. Hosted at IBM we ate, worked and laughed (and as I am not a coder I will admit it often felt as if it was in that order). I enjoyed it not just because of the incredible people I was lucky enough to have on my team: Gene Dolgin, Judith Phillips,  Eyal Sela, Gerry Rovnick, Elisha Klein, Shay Nagel, Itay Zandbank, Yishai Beeri and Eugene Shcherbina but because of the learning experience.

The “weekend” started with people going up on stage for 2 minutes and pitching their ideas to the crowd. The pitches were in Hebrew and English and ran the gamut from a secular dating service to a game scientist who wanted to do something with e-learning. I thought that loads had potential to be brilliant products and serious businesses.

With my background in online gambling I probably should have gone with the e-learning gaming guy but instead I went with Gene Dolgin who pitched a conference networking tool. There were several reasons why I chose his pitch:

• He stated the pain.
• He explained how his solution healed the pain.
• The business model (i.e. how it would make money) was self evident.
• It was something that seemed like it could be built in a weekend.
• He sounded like he had already done some homework on competition and knew that this wasn’t being done by anyone else in this way at this time.
• He works as an analyst in a VC so he would have a good idea of what would be strong and weak in his own model.
• Extremely charismatic on stage – seriously. This kid guy was charming. He sounded like he would be fun to work with.

People worked insane hours (especially Eugene Shcherbina who lost two nights of sleep working on mockups) and in the end a working model was made. We asked specifically if we could go last for our presentation.

Which would have been a great thing if…

• Our presentation didn’t get lost (G-d knows how this happened – apparently they had checked to see that they were all there and somehow at the end ours presentation was no longer)
• The demo didn’t fail absolutely and completely (funny enough it worked on the phone, but the web mockup thing just died – kaput)

And with those two lovely circumstances on our side, we shockingly didn’t win. I will say, Gene handled himself extremely gracefully under pressure.

What I took away from the weekend:

• Double check yourself when someone else says that the PPT is loaded
• Carry a spare copy of said PPT on a USB with you
• Just because an idea might be a good company doesn’t make it a winner – these are VCs judging, they are after the big return. Not necessarily the solid medium size business.
• The level of professionalism can go into the toilet when everyone is lacking sleep – make sure your team has a good sense of humor (which fortunately we all did) or else things could get ugly (which ours did not).

The winner of the weekend was iS/iT? a web aggregator that confirms information by seeing how often something is mentioned online. There are so many ways this couldn’t work – but their demo was so bloody brilliant I could see the plugin taking off as a pure viral amusement piece, regardless of accuracy and potential SEO spam site abuses. The second I saw their presentation I knew they had won. And to be honest, I don’t even remember their pitch from the first day. Way to pull it together guys.

It was amazing to come together with complete strangers in order to build something. What absolute brilliant fun.