4 ms·

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

by rjvir 12y ago

untog 12y ago
Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?
- TimFogarty 12y ago
  Hackathons are a pretty good way of starting something like this for a college student (though obviously not the only way). I know several groups people who met at hackathons then went on to start a larger project together (often not the same project they did at the hackathon). That's one of the nice thing about college hackathons - you get to meet other students who like to build stuff in their spare time.
birken 12y ago
This isn't necessarily an alternative, but a good compliment would be finding an open source project you like and make a few different contributions to it. You'll learn a bunch of skills that are entirely independent of things you'd learn at a hackathon, but are very useful: - How to read other people's code - How to write code that wont be immediately thrown away (a problem generally at school) - How to interface with project maintainers and get your changes accepted into the project
wpietri 12y ago
Ship something and iterate. The thing that makes me crazy about hackathons is that they reinforce the school mentality of "I am going to do a thing for a small amount of time, get some approval, and then ignore it forever." For people doing anything real, it's poisonous. I would much rather see people commit to a semester of weekly demos with the understanding that they were supposed to ship to real users by week 4 at the latest. Then the goals would all be about improvement. More users, better service, more polished product. That's the essence of startup life. If people really want to do a weekend thing, I'd much prefer something like Lean Startup Machine, an event I occasionally mentor at. There the weekend isn't about building, it's about iteratively testing customer and product hypotheses. It basically ignores the tech side of tech startups and is mainly about customer development. I think that's a great choice for novices to understand startup mentality because it teaches you that a) you know nothing until you have proof from your customers, b) your notions about your business are probably wrong, and that c) the best way to deal with that is to find out as soon as possible so you can get better notions.

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

by rjvir 12y ago

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

untog 12y ago

Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?

TimFogarty 12y ago
Hackathons are a pretty good way of starting something like this for a college student (though obviously not the only way). I know several groups people who met at hackathons then went on to start a larger project together (often not the same project they did at the hackathon). That's one of the nice thing about college hackathons - you get to meet other students who like to build stuff in their spare time.

birken 12y ago

This isn't necessarily an alternative, but a good compliment would be finding an open source project you like and make a few different contributions to it. You'll learn a bunch of skills that are entirely independent of things you'd learn at a hackathon, but are very useful: - How to read other people's code - How to write code that wont be immediately thrown away (a problem generally at school) - How to interface with project maintainers and get your changes accepted into the project

wpietri 12y ago

Ship something and iterate. The thing that makes me crazy about hackathons is that they reinforce the school mentality of "I am going to do a thing for a small amount of time, get some approval, and then ignore it forever." For people doing anything real, it's poisonous. I would much rather see people commit to a semester of weekly demos with the understanding that they were supposed to ship to real users by week 4 at the latest. Then the goals would all be about improvement. More users, better service, more polished product. That's the essence of startup life. If people really want to do a weekend thing, I'd much prefer something like Lean Startup Machine, an event I occasionally mentor at. There the weekend isn't about building, it's about iteratively testing customer and product hypotheses. It basically ignores the tech side of tech startups and is mainly about customer development. I think that's a great choice for novices to understand startup mentality because it teaches you that a) you know nothing until you have proof from your customers, b) your notions about your business are probably wrong, and that c) the best way to deal with that is to find out as soon as possible so you can get better notions.