Fear and Coding on the StartupBus: Wired.com reporter Keith Axline is embedded on a StartupBus bound for the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. It's one of six such buses filled with coders competing to turn bright ideas into startup prototypes during the 48-hour road trip.
LOS ANGELES – Only hours after leaving San Francisco on the StartupBus, a tour bus filled with coders and bright ideas, I joined the walkIN team.
Our startup plan: Take on Open Table with a reservation app that will allow people to walk up to a restaurant, scan a QR code on the establishment's door with their smartphone, see estimated wait times and instantly make a reservation.
After our team was established, it was only a matter of minutes before our devs were building an API. Keith Hanson set up everyone with workflow manager AgileZen and defined a few URLs for user registration and authorization.
"We have our first ticket!" yelled Hanson.
With nine people, we're the largest team in StartupBus' short history. Here are my team members:
• Alex King, a user experience designer from Vast.com
• Keith and Ken Hanson, twins from Louisiana who founded Twin Engine Labs. Ken does front-end design while Keith handles the backend
• Jesse Ditson, a developer and founder of Dinnerpedia.com
• Jared Hanson, a developer at Aspera
• Bhavin N. Shah, founder of Gazillion Entertainment
• Josh Best, founder and portfolio manager at Kis Capital
• James Williams, developer at Taulia with a background in Android.
While Alex and Ken worked on the app design, Keith and Jesse tackled the servers and backend, James went to town on the Android implementation, Jared started coding the iOS app and Bhavin and Josh planned the organization and equity plan of the business. (I contributed ideas where I could but was admittedly out of my technical depth.)
Shortly thereafter, we held a meeting on equity distribution, where we were each given 0.75 percent in the company with an additional 0.75 percent to be vested after the South by Southwest panel presentation on March 14th. This is to reward members who continue to work on the project and limit the equity of those who decide to check out.
These guys aren't messing around. I feel like I've joined a SWAT team on a drug raid and they just handed me a gun and said, "Go." There are a dozen huge developments every five minutes.
We've now stopped in Los Angeles and we're heading out to interview restaurants for some on-the-ground research. Stay tuned.
Photos: Keith Axline/Wired.com
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