After 4 solid days of learning, coding, designing, writing and generally moving the dial on their startups, WebFWD teams are back home, digesting and applying what they learned - and ate - during our Summit.
We wanted to let the teams speak for themselves:
“Our time with Jim Cook helped us realize the need to identify what we’re better at than our competitors (features, price etc.). A serendipitous meeting with Melissa and Chrissie helped us with our marketing and brand positioning. And as always, getting refueled is uber awesome when trying to do a startup. The positive energy from all of the teams is amazingly helpful. I genuinely feel like everyone there was a friend and partner in crime.” - Jaisen Maithai of OpenPhoto
“The biggest benefit to me was learning what challenges the other teams in the program were facing, and their approaches to solving them. It’s invaluable to be able to talk through and brainstorm with others that have a different perspective, but ultimately the same goal of creating a product or company with long-lasting impact.” - J Herskowitz of Tomahawk
“I had an amazing time at the summit. All the generous Mozillians that offered their expertise were so helpful, even to me, easily the least tech savvy in the group. I feel fairly confident talking about and understanding a world that just a year ago seemed completely alien. I also learned a ton from my fellow WebFWD members - being able to talk about our projects together was really helpful for me. I had a million new ideas for CASH while hashing out other people’s problems. We face so many of the same issues and other folks’ take on them is always a good way to see a problem in a new light. All in all I can safely say that Jesse and I left the summit feeling inspired and totally focused on getting CASH to the next level.” - Maggie Vail of CASH Music
“We got to meet some really incredible people with fascinating stories to tell. We learned a lot about startups and had a fun time exploring the possibilities in the open innovation space.” - Diwank Tomer of iHeartCode
“It was incredibly inspiring to be a part of this summit. Diane and Pascal have brought together people from literally all over the world who are working on some incredible projects. This really shows the power of open source development to bring people together, the backbone of what so many of us are working to do, building community and collaboration for a more open web. Entropy Wave has already benefitted from the constructively critical feedback and advice we’ve received from being a part of WebFWD, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the program goes moving forward.” - Tristan Crane of Entropy Wave
“The WebFWD summit was great accelerator for the BigBlueButton project. From the first day alone we got valuable feedback on improving our user experience, integration with WebRTC, and viable business models to support an open source project. Also, the four days of close collaboration with the WebFWD teams really built for us strong sense of fellowship between our groups as we helped each other to succeed.” - Fred Dixon of BigBlueButton
“Synbiota learned many things!
- We learned about the culture inside of Mozilla. We were especially intrigued by the organization, efficiency, and inclusiveness of the AirMozilla Monday meet up. Very cool. These insights are already shaping our thoughts on how we will operate.
- We learned that Mozilla is much much more than just Firefox.
- We learned how to better analyze and break down milestones and to really understand what each milestone means and what to do if that milestone hasn’t been achieved. We are entering more and more into the data-driven mindset.
- We learned that our project is difficult to explain and so it works best (so far) to begin a pitch with context, followed by problem, opportunity and then solution.
- We had our first encounter with participating in an open-source, distributed hackfest. This will help us to stage future events.
- We learned the importance of testing everyone’s products and eating one another’s dog food.
- The WebFWD group is a global force!”
Many others participated - for giggles, you can see their responses through Diane’s Storify story….enjoy!
