Startup Monday: Startup Weekend Los Angeles Recap – Part 1

First let me just saw, wow. Last night was one of the most incredible, eye-opening, and inspirational events I’ve ever attended. Los Angeles Startup Weekend ended last night with a slew of incredible presentations from some incredible teams. The entire event took place at CoLoft and the popular LA co-working space was jam-packed as entrepreneurs had five minutes to present what they had built in a weekend.

Let’s just take a step back to appreciate this. Many of these teams built fully-functional products in one weekend. This is the beauty of these events is the incredible combination of agile development and lean startup principles being brought together by truly incredible people. What’s really incredible to think about is that something like this wasn’t really possible ten years ago. We are living in an incredible time where the barriers to development are being broken down and it really comes down to finding a need, finding great people, and making it happen.

Below are a few videos of the room before the presentations took place. This was one of those events where I knew pictures just wouldn’t share the energy as much as video, so I took tons of video which I’ll be sharing over this series of posts:

Don’t worry, I took plenty of HD video which I stayed-up pretty late processing and putting-together into a video that you’ll see in part 2 of this post! Before the teams presented the judges and mentors were able to share some of their wisdom with the group. Many of them shared the experience of starting a company, the good and the bad, and what it takes to really create something that sees real traction and becomes successful.

Next, the teams went one by one and presented what they had made for five minutes each followed a few minutes of questions from the judges. At the end of the night the judges deliberated and picked their winners. First place went to Look.io who developed the first-ever in-app technical support. This was a very slick solution and I’m still flabbergasted that these guys were able to pull it off in a weekend!

Second place was awarded to skilloop who created a very cool concept around connecting people that wanted to learn a skill with experts that could teach them. Both of these teams not only come-up with amazing ideas, they had great teams and both built absolutely beautiful user interfaces.

There was also a third place and 4th place honorable mention which I’ll cover in Part 2 along with sharing some of the HD footage I took at the event. With so much to cover I knew this had to be broken-down into three parts so stay-tuned, part two is coming-up later this evening!