Last week I participated for the second time in a row in an event called Startup weekend, a startup event that takes place in many locations around the world. As I live in Tel-Aviv, I participated in the local one, which took place this year in Peres center for peace in Jaffa (which is just south of Tel-Aviv). One of the unique things about this specific startup weekend was the population that was comprised of both Israeli’s and Palestinians from the west bank. This gave us a nice opportunity to get together around something completely unrelated to politics. Hopefully, one day this will be the norm.

The idea in startup weekend is to create a proof-of-concept startup over a weekend. It starts with short 1-2 minute pitches of whoever has an idea, on any subject, continues with a process in which 10 groups get together around the most favored ideas, and ends after ~54 hours with a 5-10 minutes presentation of each group that includes a demo and a rough business direction.  In the final event, the first three places are selected by a panel of judges. The team I participated in took second place this year.

Actually it’s worth mentioning that last year, the team I participated in also took second place, but more importantly a real startup emerged (one that is still operating)! I’m hoping it might happen this year as well.

Back to this year’s startup weekend - following is the presentation that summarizes what we managed to accomplish over the weekend.


It mostly comes to shows that a lot can be achieved in a short time, if you have good team members and a good spirit of cooperation. We had plenty of those and more in our team.  So, I recommend you to check if one of these events is happening nearby and try it out (the event is open for practically anyone regardless of professional background)

http://startupweekend.org/