Thurs night I got back to Dallas after 19 days away.
Friday night was the most cinematic I have ever experienced. If only we filmed the whole thing…with some choice editing we would have a hit short film. Sadly, the combination of a lot of red wine with Czech digestif along with the truly bizarre nature of the evening’s denouement made for a very blurry memory regarding the particulars.
Photo by cks.
Saturday was BarCamp Dallas 3, to which I arrived late and left early, much to my regret, because it was fantastic. During Entrepreneurial Improv1, I had the grievous idea for a business involving a team of employees dumpster diving in Beverly Hills for artifacts from celebrity coitus. Fortunately the rest of my team didn’t really get the specifics of the idea, but ran with the dumpster diving. Jay finalized the domain (which, oddly, is actually taken already). And the BA-RIlliant Real Adam presented our plan for the win! Again I hope/wish there was a camera present because the improved, totally dry comedy would be ROFL funny again and again.
“Recombobulating service!” Photo by cks
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The original post remains, but I’m copying most of it here for posterity:
Here’s the idea: Get a group of geeks in a room. Have them yell out thirty or forty random words. Divide everyone up into teams of five. Each team picks two of the words and adds “.com” to form a company name. Give each team fifteen minutes to come up with a business plan, and five minutes to present to a panel of judges. Hilarity ensues.
For this go-round, the judges were Jim Young of Jambo and Giovanni Gallucci of AgencyBlog. The teams were LatexRobot.com (don’t ask), g.littr.com (dumpster diving social network), UpTownish.com (high end dating for Dallas posers) and ToothBling.com (electronics for the mouth). The unanimous winner was g.littr.com, the strangely compelling and unsettlingly probably tool for those who live by the dumpster.
The key to running one of these things seems to be an absolutely ruthless approach to timing. Keep the pressure up, move things along, and you can get through four teams in an hour session with time to spare.
It’s a total blast to watch a group of relative strangers gel into a startup team. The energy is addictive. There may be a video, I’ll link to it when it shows up.