Last weekend, I took part in the QUT organised Startup Weekend for Creative Tech. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has a large stake in the creative industries space. They host the Coterie, a co-working space geared towards creatives. QUT also has a Creative Enterprise department that runs accelerators for creative people. So I had high expectations going into the weekend. But it did not go well. My team slowly disintegrated, I got food poisoning and missed all of Sunday. But I did manage to make one contact at the event that might lead to something. So that's something!

Reflecting on the weekend, the first red flag was when the organisers couldn't quite define what they meant by "creative startups" and fell back on the old gem "no banking". To be fair, no one looks at banking and thinks "creative", and if they do, it usually starts and stops with "creative accounting" which is illegal and has tanked the world economy enough times - thank you very much! But I still expected a bit of a better definition from the organisers of the creative tech startup weekend.

The next thing that didn't quite work as intended was that in their zeal, the organisers got everybody present to pitch. So there were 90 participants. About 40 to 50 were already pitching, but the organiser encouraged everyone to pitch. It was a great idea on paper, but a terrible idea when the dinner and free networking finished at 7 PM and the venue was going to close at 10 PM. We didn't start voting on the pitches until 9:30 PM and that wasn't a lot of time to mingle and form groups.

Despite this, I left Friday night thinking I was in a good group with a clear idea to spend the weekend working on a startup for a medical IoT device. I came back on Saturday to find that no, apparently the team wasn't on the same page and we were going to build a fashion IoT device. That wouldn't be too bad except that fashion IoT device was something that sounds cool, but no one would buy. I demonstrated clearly to my group that the idea wasn't viable, but I fell into a circular argument because one of my teammates was completely married to his idea and just wouldn't accept reality. I should have heeded the red flag and left the team. But I perversely tried to make the best of the situation. But, there is a reason why the wisdom in the startup space is to bail when you think you should bail.

Anyway, I didn't get a lot of out of the weekend, and after I got food poisoning, I pretty much left what remained of my team in the lurch on Sunday. All and all, I think I'll sit out for the other weekend-long commitments for awhile.