What Startup Weekend means for Mexico

In Startup Weekend Mexicans experience their potential to be creative and innovative. And the culture of cooperation that people lives during these events is not typical in Mexico. How people cooperates and creates innovations during the weekend is a symbol of how the industry was transforming itself.

Startup Weekend is a symbol of how the Internet industry can use the power of cooperation to become innovation-based. Gustavo, a mentor for the Monterrey event, said that he was “stunned” to see how participants were ready to create innovative products, and cooperate even if that meant they should change their original business ideas, and continue to learn from everyone else. Gustavo found that this mindset was a stark contrast with the “older”, risk averse software companies he knew in Monterrey, which delivered software services only using pre-packaged software solutions produced by foreign software companies. Gustavo explained that the older companies were not interested in continuous education, never attended the relevant courses organized in the city, and saw their programmers as a commodity rather than potential business partners.

Startup Weekend was a symbol of the creativity of the Mexican startup community, as opposed to the destruction created by drug related violence in Mexico. Monterrey in particular was hit hard by violence. A week before a brutal incident took many innocent lives. Naturally, the city had a bad image in the media. But in a note at The Next Web titled “Why Monterrey needed a Startup Weekend”, Vlad, one of the Monterrey organizers, explained that the event showed how “there are still a lot of people [in Monterrey] that build instead of destroy”. Startup Weekend participants felt that they were part of a change in the city.

Many participants found these events representative of what they stood for: a young and ambitious group of people who are able to transform their reality and create with the support of their community. Cesar, was candid in his final remarks at the Startup Weekend Monterrey. He explained how he was very afraid to come to Monterrey in the first place, but overcame his fears and went to the event:

“And we are here and we are building new things. The reason why this [Startup Weekend] is important, it is because the most great manifestation of human being is the capacity to build, it is the capacity of how you can create new things.
And the reason why entrepreneurship, design and engineering are so fascinating is because all of them are about creating how things will happen. When you combine those three things, it is when you have the power in reality, not [just] in the rhetoric, to change the situations.”

Cesar, along with the rest of the startup community, found their startups to be profoundly meaningful. While Monterrey and Mexico were experiencing difficult times, the startup community believed in their ability to transform the reality of their industry, their country, and the world, through the technologies that they were creating and through the wealth that their companies could produce.

Startup Weekend symbolized the creative potential of the Mexican startup community in a global context. A few weeks after the Monterrey event, a blog devoted to Mexican startups compared the projects presented in Startup Weekend Monterrey with the projects presented in Tech Crunch Disrupt—a major event in the US presenting upcoming startups from Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The post explained that while the projects presented in both events were comparable in the creativity and timeliness of their concepts, the projects in the US event were much more “developed”. The authors of the post explained while “we’re not that far behind in Mexico (specifically Monterrey) at least in idea…We need to improve on implementation [sic].” The appeal that the authors made to the community in Mexico showed their conviction that the talent in Mexico is comparable to the best, but that they need to work with dedication to create successful startups.