On February 1st 2013, 80 participants gathered in Parisoma’s collaborative workspace to embark on a weekend of experimentation.

They came from all disciplines and silos: Designers, coders, artists, film makers, story tellers, business people and entrepreneurs.

Startupweekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.

A group of volunteers including Transmedia SF members joined together to produce the very first Startup Weekend Transmedia.

The goal of the weekend is to merge the philosophy of startup weekend which combines the rapid prototyping and lean startup methodologies with creating cross-platform projects over a period of 54 hours.

The topic for the weekend was “The city”.

We had esteemed judges, including the deputy Innovation officer of the city of San Francisco.

We had a tool box with different apps and tools to help through the weekend and

A wonderful group of sponsors and a keynote opening speech from Corey Ford, CEO of Matter –  a start-up accelerator in San Francisco that supports media entrepreneurs building a more informed, connected, and empowered society.

5 quick lessons:

• 54 hours is a great amount of time to develop an idea from concept to MVP (minimum viable product)
• The business world is changing and for creatives and Transmedia practitioners to thrive they need to adopt some of the ideas from the startup world – such as business models.
• Giving people structure and a time constraint leads to amazing results.
• People need mentorship in helping them develop their why, their core story or transmedia narrative – we found that a lot of people had the issue in finding their story – this is vital for any startup or project.
• We need to get more hybrid groups to start working together, learning from each other to help develop sustainable business ecosystem.

 All in all the experiment was a success – we had 12 projects finish and some great winners and prizes.