How to start a company on a bus (and then party at SXSW)

Put 25 strangers in a bus with lots of Wi-Fi and coffee and drive it from San Francisco to Austin, just in time for SXSW.  Tell them to come up with five business ideas by the time they hit Texas, two days later. There, they present business ideas to the Capital Factory, an incubator group in Austin and eStrategyGroup, an Australian consulting firm. The winner also gets mentoring, advice and, possibly, funding from a Silicon Valley angel investor. Welcome to the Startup Bus. Sure, it was a gimmick, but it was also kind of hopeful. A bus full of innovative ideas being bounced around, perhaps a startup or two coming out of it, and somehow maybe, cash at the end of that rainbow. Mark Halvorson, blogging from the bus, gave a play-by-play (sort of) of what was happening:

It has been quite a journey so far. Everything started on Monday with a kick off party at Atlassian headquarters in San Francisco. The event turned into a bit of a hack session as the buspreneurs were finishing up the features of the website for launch the next morning which came a little too early as the bus left around 6:30 a.m. and the site still wasn’t finished. More hacking between San Francisco and Cupertino for a visit to HP’s Executive Briefing Center for a session innovation with Phil McKinney, HP’s CTO.

After an inspirational talk about how to come up with innovative ideas the team got profile photos taken and we were off to LA. Between San Francisco and LA the group split into teams and conceived their ideas. This is when the fun really started as there were only a few short hours to solidify the idea before pitching it to random people in Santa Monica on video. The bus continued on to Palm Springs for some rest (or I think its called rest – I haven’t had any for a while).

Startup Bus feels both innovative and gimmicky at the same time, but it’s actually not a first, except for the wheels. There have been other startup camps, and  there’s even Startup Weekend, which “recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects” according to its website. “Sometimes a company emerges, sometimes one doesn’t. Some companies go on to produce revenue or get seed funding, but every time people leave with more experience, insight, knowledge, friends, and resources than they came with.”

Are any lasting companies—or lasting startups—going to come out of these reality-TV like experiments in close-quarters living crossed with caffeine crossed with creativity? Who knows. Out of the Startup Bus emerged DataBrowsr, which bills itself as a “controversial new way to explore online dating photos.” The website at this early date is mostly  photos of young women and their cleavage. In fact the premise seems, umm, a little sketchy. According to the founders: “online dating is hard, frustrating and time consuming.  At the end of the day image is everything and all else is nothing. DateBrowsr will aggregate profiles from the leading online dating websites based on your interests and wants and get right to the point of what do those people look like.” It’s not clear if DataBrowsr will actually make the “all else” stuff in people’s profiles worth noting–their innovation appears to be allowing users to rank the photos.

DataBrowsr shared first place with DormDorm, a company that aims to get universities and colleges to rent out dorm rooms sitting vacant over the summer , when hotel rooms are at a premium. According to their website:

There are approximately 1.8 million dorm rooms spread out around the US in major urban centers and beautiful small towns. These rooms sit mostly empty for three months every summer – when other rooms are at a premium. They run the gambit from private triple rooms with shared bathrooms to full apartments with kitchens, living rooms, private bathrooms and bedrooms. One thing they all have in common though is that they are private, safe, clean and significantly less expensive than hotels.

This is, actually, a good idea. Much better than aggregating photos of cleavage.  And last week—right before the bus arrived in Austin for its launch party—DormDorm announced it had raised $20K in financing, albeit all virtual, part of a game on its website. They are, however, talking to angel investors.