I've been to two and it was a positive enough experience for me to not only endorse it, but I'm helping to organize it. It's a great way to meet potential co-founders, kick the tires on an idea, and get the general feeling for whether or not startup life is for you.

To be fair, I will say that my first team imploded, fragmented, and I wound up dropping out from disappointment. But that in and of itself was a true to life startup experience that I learned a lot from in terms of people skills and well worth the ticket price.

That said...you can use TRIKRO as a discount code for 25% off.

I realize in my previous reply, I had a typo: "making hard decisions with the a team".

I meant to type "making hard decisions with the A-Team", because Startup Weekend is so awesome, even Bosco is going to want to invest.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I pity the fool.

Totally agreed. A failed startup is definitely worth the time spent. You get to learn about the industry you're attacking, you get to learn about making hard decisions with the a team (and how to pick future partners, which is highly underrated), and you get to learn about all the extra things that it takes to launch a company beyond "come up with idea for thing; make thing". Plus, it's surprising how often things created during the first version of a startup can be reused in a next version.

I have been to two events in NYC. They were great for me to learn and netwotk with people with similar interests. I liked it enough that I now volunteer to help organize these events. There is a great balance between ui/ux, developers and business/marketing types. Also is a gpod way to vet an idea quickly. Theleanstartupmachine.com is another similar event, more focused on the lean startup methods.

I would have said it's more focused on tightly customer development from my experience, despite the name. Of course, that's a part of lean startup methodology, but I tend to associated lean startup with many of the development techniques such as continuous deployment and rapid A/B testing which isn't necessarily feasible over the weekend (although I've seen some pull it off well.)

I know all the players involved, and they are phenomenal. Tristan kicks ass. The panelists: Jason Purtorti, Chris McCann, Daniel and David Weekly are all very cool, very amazing people.