HalfBaked.com - Entrepreneurial Improv

I stole the idea for my Bar Camp Dallas 3 session. It was a good decision. Amit Gupta and, indirectly, Dave McClure, James Levine and Paul Rademacher are excellent people to steal from.

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.

tags:barcamp,barcampdallas,barcampdallas3,halfbaked,halfbakeddotcom