Lean Startup Machine teams are on their marks for the biggest iteration of the event yet. This time, LSM eschewed the “first-come, first-served” policy and asked for an application in addition to the $250 fee. About 130 people applied; they accepted 50 and “ended up overselling to 70 people, and had people still fighting to get off the wait list,” organizer Trevor Owens said.
LSM is a 48-hour conference where entrepreneurs and coders form teams, build and pitch products in a weekend. The conference attracts people from all over the world, but it’s about 80 percent New Yorkers, Mr. Owens said.
The event takes place at General Assembly, starting with pizza at 6 p.m. on Friday and pitches at 8:30 p.m. Mentors coming in this weekend will include Steve Cheney, business development at GroupMe; Emily Hickey, marketing officer at Hashable; Kyle Bragger, founder of Forrst; Brandon Diamond of NYHacker; Jason Baptiste, co-founder at OnSwipe and Ben Fisher, co-founder of LSM and about ten others.
The participants are “not the normal scene,” Mr. Owens said. “It’s a lot of people we know but the vast majority are people that are currently maybe employed somewhere in the tech community and maybe are making that jump to entrepreneurship. It’s not people you would normally see on the scene.”
So it’s not the hackathon tourists, you know like those same people who go to all the hackathons? Betabeat asked.
“It’s tough to compare it to a hackathon,” Mr. Owens said. “There’s not as much programming. We call it a customer development-athon. A cus-dev-athon.”
That’s terrible, Betabeat said, and suggested start-upathon.
“Learnathon?”
Leanathon?
“I don’t even know. There’s not really a good word for it,” he said.
