What is StartupBus?

It’s a bus driving cross country with strangers on board who start companies on the trip.

Actually it’s been 10 buses this year from New York, Washington DC, Boston, Florida, Mexico, Cincinnati, Louisiana, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. They all drove three days to Austin, Texas for the South By Southwest Festival.

The people who board the bus are programmers, designers or business people. They mostly don’t know each other before, but certainly haven’t worked with each other closely. All have some sort of background in Startups and know there way around with starting things.

So this is how my experience was for the New York Bus: Boarding on Tuesday at 4am in the morning, after just some few hours of post-pre-party sleep. Rounds of intros and idea pitches. Teams are formed. The teams start to work on the idea by conceptualizing, building a MVP, researching the market and establishing connections to potential customers and business partners.

The buses went all day and arrived in a city in the evening where usually a pitch/networking event, often in combination with other buses, was held. Afterwards people booked into hotels for work or sleep until the buses left in the morning again.

After three days all buses converged in San Antonio and the teams then went to Austin to finish up their works. The conductors decided on which teams may pitch in the semi-finals. From there a jury decided on who advances to the finals the next day, where a winner was chosen.

What is StartupBus really?

It’s about the people, not the products. It’s about building a community. I think only a small fraction of all companies built will continue to live in any way. But I’m sure that a lot of the people participating will at a later point either found their own startup or at least work in one.

The competition is a huge driver for the teams and gives the conductors the opportunity to push the teams to their limits. Sometimes it left us with a shallow feeling when milestones where mostly only needed for the judges but had little real value, but you can always chose if you want to play along or not. It’s a game.

One of my major take-aways was pitching and ‘getting shit done’. From early on, a huge emphasis was put on the pitch. It forced us to limit scope and ‘get real’. Even though my team was eventually able to craft a really nice prototype, StartupBus is less about building something awesome, but more about conceptualizing it and thinking it through as well as how to build well-working team. Another good trait I practised was networking skills, walking up to people and try to figure out the value for each other as quick as possible (but not being creepy about it). Somehow this appears easier to me in the US, where very content focused encounters with little small talk are well accepted.

Things have to suck (a bit)

There were many things that sucked about StartupBus. I get motion sick quite bad. There weren’t enough power outlets in the bus. In general, there wasn’t enough space. Our windows became whiteboards. The floor became extra storage. Other people were constantly in the way. Even though we had a lot of Mifi mobile internet boxes, they don’t work well in the middle of nowhere and crappy internet is worse than no internet, because you sink a lot of time hoping it might work now. Sleep was never enough. The food on the road was bad.

The interesting thing is that I feel that all these things contributed to the experience. Especially in my team a “us against the world” feeling formed that led to high team cohesion. Also as everyone was pushed way out of their comfort zone, decision-making and overall communication were very effective. We spent less time on sensitivities and fears, but focused on making stuff happen instead. We stopped caring and started making.

Given that building a community is the overall goal, giving ways to distinguish your team, bus and StartupBus in general from the world seems to necessary, it enabled me to build strong bonds with the people involved but also I do share a common understanding with all the people I will meet in the future who went through the same procedure.

And now?

StartupBus got a lot of attention this year. For example check the articles in The Atlantic Wire and Bloomberg Business Week. Also there are more articles coming up, for example one in Time Magazine by an embedded journalist who rode in our bus. Harvard Business school also did research on entrepreneurship in the context of StartupBus. And I’m already excited for the class of next year. And one more thing: StartupBus is coming to Europe this year. It will be awesome. You should be on it!

Bonus: How did I get on the bus?

I heard about StartupBus about a month before the bus started. To be able to apply you have to be invited by an alumni and luckily i got help. I had a 15-minute Skype interview with Mike, the conductor of the New York bus, where I had to answer two questions: “Why do you want to get on the bus?” – “What was your most successful project”. I actually prepared that interview well and even hustled some testimonials from Dave, Eric and Henrik (thanks guys!). Some days later I was confirmed. To be on the bus every participant paid $300 which is a fair price looking at the overall calculation of having the buses run cross-country for several days. I arrived in New York some days before the bus departure and participated a bit in the pre-hackathon for setting up the StartupBus website and stock exchange game. The night before departure we had a small pre-party to get to know each other and then Boom, the fun started.

On the road. Tomorrow I will fly to New York and board the NYC StartupBus. It will be 3 days, 3000 kilometers and 30 ‘buspreneurs’ hacking and crafting on 3G internet on a bus driving cross country. We’ll eventually land in Austin on March 9th for the beginning of South By Southwest.

I’m very excited about the bus trip. It seems that the bus will be filled with awesome people and high energy. I tend to get travel sick, so let’s see how that pans out. Also somehow this whole project sounds like a silly idea, and I’m all in for silliness. I like working under constraints.

I’ll stay in Austin for about a week, probably hanging out at the SoundCloud Open House and the Hypem Hotel a lot. If you want to meet and talk about hackingz and starting things or give me a place to sleep (seriously!) you know how to find me.

• I like Loopcam. Here are some .gifs I made.
• Listen to a story of mine on storywheel.cc
• “Make Lists. Not War” => Workflowy
• Nice talk by Oren Jacob (former CTO from Pixar) about scaling an organization
• “Padrino = Sinatra++” looks interesting

• Star Wars: A New Hope (Uncut: Director’s Cut)
• arte.tv has a nice streaming library. Watch Ter Haar and Nils Frahm.
• Mackie releases an iPad-controlled sound mixer with an epic promo video

• The Rise of Spotify
• Learn programming with Codecademy
• Shit Silicon Allee Says
• Looking for a job? SoundCloud, Readmill and Gidsy are hiring.

• GitHub’s image compare view is awesome
• Premature generalization is part of the root of all evil.
• “Squash it, Push it, Merge, Deploy it“

• Lemur, the legendary multi-touch controller, is back on iOS
• A map of guitar stores in Berlin

• PressPausePlay is a great free movie reflecting on the current shift in creative industries.
• Oxt Weekend: The new way to say, “Not this weekend by the weekend after.”
• This Is Why I’m Broke

• “Stylometry” is a great word
• Stepping sideways might also just be moving forward in a different direction
• I donated 50 € to Wikipedia. Because it’s among the best things ever!
• I’m working on making Music Hack Day Reykjavík happening in October 2012. Excitement!

With the beginning of this new year I’m not a SoundClouder anymore.

I joined SoundCloud as an intern and freelancer over three years ago when I was still a Bachelor student. After graduating I started full time, working on the API and the website, making client developers and users happy every day. On the side I ran TracksOnAMap, TakesQuestions and SoundCloud Labs, attended many MusicHackDays and organized the Berlin one.

It’s been an incredible time. The best thing was to work with such an incredibly smart team. Every morning I woke up full of excitement to see what this best-team-in-the-world is going to create today. The time at the cloud was my coming-of-age as a developer and team worker. Beneath all the practical skills I’ve improved like writing maintainable code, designing a clean product and communicating effectively, I learned how effective one can be with the right motivation and supportive structure. And how much fun being “in the game” can be.

Working at SoundCloud is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I’m proud and grateful that I was able to participate. The SoundCloud story has been incredible so far and it is far from finished. It will be even more disruptive the next year than ever before and already started with a bang. If you are searching for an amazing job, check these kick-ass open positions …

And what am I going to do now? I want to broaden my horizons. I will attend some university courses. I will hack useless and/or nice stuff. I will try to find out what next I can bring to the world. If you know something, contact me now!

I’m full of excitement and respect for the time to come. It’s gonna be interesting.

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo.

It’s a classic …

[link to youtube | please watch in 720p]

• Apply now for Music Hack Day at Midem/Cannes in January
• In-browser phone calls via Twilios JavaScript API

• Want a job in Berlin? Check berlinstartupjobs.com
• CCO – Chief Cat Officer
• Search and Deploy

• Tim Exile and Alex Ljung talking about ‘sound’ for Wired
• Play guitar in your browser
• You should donate to Wikipedia now!

• Being on top of Fernsehturm in Berlin at night is beautiful
• Dense, my favorite record store in Berlin, closed
• Sleeping before going to a club is the gentlemans choice
• Interesting blog featuring a desertion on intimacy in nightclubs
• Listen to Horse The Band talking about the meaning of life
• “The biggest favor you can do for yourself when deciding what to bring is to buy a very small travel bag” from Vagabonding