Thoughts from Startup Weekend Delhi

I went back to Delhi after almost 6 years for Startup Weekend Mobile Delhi and it was really a wonderful experience.

Delhi as a city has changed quite a bit for the better - for starters I am super impressed with the metro, it is very convenient, nominally priced and well connected. It was very easy to go around the city on the metro. The broad roads and the flyovers around the city was a very welcome change from Bangalore and Hyderabad where there are so many traffic bottle necks.

The event by itself was very exciting in Delhi. There is a stark contrast between the same event in Hyderabad and Bangalore and some of those differences are

1. We had only one round of pitches for ideas in Delhi and got close to 70 ideas. In Hyderabad and Bangalore we got through at least 3 rounds of pitches to get the same number of ideas. The participants in all the 3 cities was just about the same.
2. The number of actual demoable products presented on the 3rd day was a lot more with almost every team having a product to demo. In Hyderabad and Bangalore you get a lot of  presentations without actual product demos.
3. There was a lot of use of white boards and charts in SW Delhi as against a lot of coding in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

My experience has been that the participants in Delhi were more business minded on how to actually take a product to market where as in Hyderabad and Bangalore the focus was more on hacking together something with the business coming secondary.