HalfBaked.com — Entrepreneurial Improv
My session at BarCampNYC2 last weekend was called “HalfBaked.com”, 90 minutes of interactive entrepreneurial improv. It was inspired by, and put together with help from, Dave McClure, Paul Rademacher, and James Levine.
The basic idea:
- The audience shouts out 50-60 random words, which we throw up on the screen.
- People split up into teams of five, and each team picks two words which become their company name.
- The teams have ten minutes to come up with a business plan (name, product, logo, marketing plan, revenue model, tagline) and a pitch.
- Each team gets five minutes to make its pitch to a panel of judges, who then ask questions and provide commentary.
- After all the pitches are complete, the judges pick a winner.
We had about 50-60 people in the session, and had to go about a half hour over because more people than I’d expected wanted to play. But the ideas were creative, the competition fierce, and the teams generated some amazing work in very little time.
All in all, it was a ton of fun. Many thanks to Cory from Spire for kicking in some sweet laptop bags as prizes, and to Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball/Google and Thatcher Bell of Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham for doing an excellent job as judges.
The session was recorded and you can watch it on Google Video. It’s also popped up on a few blogs and in this Wired article about BarCamp.
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