HelpHookup Presentation at Google

Wow, our team is spreading the word out like crazy. We just did a presentation at Google’s OpenSocial event. It was great to see our weekend work already on the big screens at the  Googleplex. Alexander, Abdul, Ivan, and Elsi pulled off an impressive show. Thank you guys. Here are some snippets:

What inspired you ?

It had been a tough 5 days & I was ready to call it a week when something told me that I should check out the startupweekend event at Microsoft’s San Francisco Office — I was not to be disappointed.

What is a startupweekend event? In a nutshell, 85-100 of the smartest, most interesting, most varied people you would ever meet come together under controlled chaos and create something special. There are no pre-set rules, tools or modes of conduct — rather these are defined by the community at adhoc meetings that take place as the need arises.

This weekend, we came together & built a community response tool – in one weekend. It was a beautiful thing – conceived, built, marketed, and released in such a short time. Kudos to Andrew Hyde, Tyler Willis & the awesome people who participated.

My Question to team is – what inspired you to stick it out & be part of this wonderful event?

Kaushal
http://thinkinnovate.blogspot.com/

The User Experience from a…User Experience consultant.

Some Thoughts about working on HelpHookup at Startupweekend, San Francisco.

A couple of months ago I was walking in downtown San Francisco with friends from the tech industry and we were all wondering: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we got a bunch of developers, designers, biz dev, marketing/PR people…even a lawyer or two, put them all in a room and see what they can come up with within a weekend?” We all thought it would be a cool idea. Just a couple of days later, I met Tyler Willis who helped Andrew Hyde, the founder of StartupWeekend, organize it in San Francisco. It was obviously an idea whose time has come.

I went to the event without knowing exactly what to expect. I happen to organize an event myself, so I know the difficulties that are involved in getting the right people to perform the right things at the right time. Even simple tasks are sometimes interpreted differently by different people which results in comic situations at best and event tragedies at worst. So building a company, with all the complexities and dynamic factors involved in the process, during a single weekend by a bunch of people who have never worked together, seemed quite a formidable and ambitious goal that seemed destined to be fraught with difficulties.

And yet, so far it has been a remarkably smooth experience given the circumstances. Much praise should go to the founder who found a  format that works. It allows highly motivated people sit down, work hard and get things done in lightning speed. Sure, mistakes are committed, discussions can get heated and some things have to be left out because we simply don’t have the time. But there is also lots of laughter and bonding, and mistakes are corrected at a higher rate than they are committed. The experience of building something so fast with people you just met is very empowering and only serves to remind us that a goal, passion and talent can bring people together with fascinating results.

On the whole, the experience of working with all the different teams responsible for getting a company off the ground is invaluable to any aspiring entrepreneur.

It’s cool, free and fun…you almost feel that working shouldn’t be like that…- yet it is

Ok, want to get back to “work”.

Alexander Pagidas.

Promo Shoot

We just shot an incredible video promo..for helphookup.com. Featuring and Starring the very sexy Elsie.. Stay Tuned!