At Techstars, every Wednesday we get together for a “family” dinner, founder story (where an invited speaker is brought in), and 8:08 (which is named for the time at which it starts). Each company hosts this for one week of the program.
Last week Stateless hosted and we wanted to share some pics.
Dinner
As Murad is from Libya, we went with food from Ali Baba’s in Boulder.
Speaker
Ryan Martens, founder of Rally, talked about their journey from formation through IPO through acquisition. Ryan then talked about Pledge 1%, and the social responsibility of companies. Stateless has decided to join.
8:08
Before the 8:08 gets started, there’s usually a transition between the founder story and the 8:08, determined by the company. With our roots in networking, we organized a game of competitive telephone… with routing. Telephone, if you don’t know, is a game where everyone lines up, and the first person is told a message, they tell it to the next person, and you see what comes out at the end of the line — usually pretty far from the original message. The twist was that we added in some routing, basically designated one from each team as a router and some rules on how to direct the messages. It was a ton of fun.
During the 8:08, there are three main parts.
First up is good news and gratitude, which is where people share their good news for the week and recognize others that provided help. Next is in the ditch moments, where people share low moments of the week. And finally, asks for help, which can be company related or personal. For each of those, when someone shares, the hosting company gives them a small item. We gave out bottles of bubbles — which apparently brought out the kid in everyone.
As the final component, is drinking the success or fail juice. Every week, each company sets quantitative goals. If you met these goals, you drink the success juice, and if you didn’t, you drink the fail juice. Sometimes the fail juices is quite nasty. Going with the Libyan theme, our success juice was mango juice, and our fail juice was sour milk. Turns out sour milk is considered a treat in Armenia, so our friends at Rodin were disappointed to have been a success that week.
