Well, Wow. That was fun.
D.C. startup weekend is sort of like an entrepreneurial jam session with the goal of launching something viable-ish by the end of the weekend.

About 70 people showed up, from about every discipline involved in tech startups. Many of them were way good at their craft, and they were all extremely pleasant to be hanging out and working with.

And yes - we launched a product: Hola Neighbor

It's a tool for neighborhoods to self-identify, connect and communicate. I've already started setting it up for my new neighborhood, and I expect my neighbors to like it enough to sign up (it is free).

Startup weekend is as interesting as an anthropological study as it is anything else, however. Watch how teams and leaders emerge. Watch how conflict is resolved in an environment where it is very low risk for everyone, mostly a-political, and where everyone has at least one shared goal, and minimal hidden agendas. A very collegial environment, where all we have to gain is some fun and a little local reputation, and all we have to lose is some time.

Process. Process matters. In this case - trying to launch a biz in 24 hours, there was a LOT of parallelism going on - UI, dev, marketing and business going off and doing things in parallel, making assumptions about what the product was and what others were thinking. The amazing thing, is that this pretty much worked. Every once in a while we synched, found out the disconnects, argued, resolved, and moved on.

More process - we set milestones, and tracked progress more or less hourly. The meetings were brief, but effective catchups. Agile-ish. Some of what was useful about this was that everyone knew the process, it was easy to comply with, and not too formal.

Critique of my own performance. So, there are many aspects to getting products up that are deeply interesting to me. Fundamentally, I'm about the value proposition - making sure that the user value of the product maps to what users care about, and that the business value prop is also real. And since there was no product management group, I sort of floated between User Exp, Marketing, and Biz Dev. Each team was self-formed and populated by truly grand people. I feel I contributed to the clarification and prioritization of issues in each group. But had I to do it again, I'd pick one and stick. I feel I let each team down by drifting. Either that, or I need to declare myself as philosophical pollinator - making sure all the groups had similar thinking on key issues.

One contribution I might have made if I stuck to one team is the keep it simple one - I think the product started simple: 3 key features, and even within the scope of 36 hours, feature creeped itself out of clarity and quick build-ability. But hey, the whole point was to have a creative weekend, so maybe that feature jam was a real part of the pleasure of being there for some.

In any case, Peter Corbett, Andrew Hyde, Jared, Matthew, Victoria, Micah and 60 others are people who I will remember fondly, especially when I catch up with my neighbors at Hola Neighbor. And I very much hope to work with many of them again sometime. I'm even thinking of going to Startup Weekend San Francisco...