Startup Weekend has become a real force for fostering entrepreneurship. I had the pleasure of speaking at the BostonEDU Startup Weekend kick-off yesterday. Some of the ideas were impressive and I do expect to see a couple of interesting companies come out of the event. I also met some really strong developers. If their startups don’t get off the ground, I hope they consider joining me at Swoop.

Here are my slides and the crib notes:

1. Do not be cool. Entrepreneurship is about action. Most startup ideas never get acted upon. Let your emotions give you energy to overcome the inertia to act.
2. Practice educated ignorance. To solve big problems in new ways you need to be reality-based but you also need distance & perspective. Find a balance and avoid what at TechStars we call mentor whiplash.
3. Bring a gun to the knife fight. Startup Weekend may be about a lot of things–building community, collaborating, coming up with good ideas & starting companies to name a few–but at it’s core it is about selling. You need to sell yourself and your idea so that you can recruit a great team at the event and accomplish seemingly impossible things over a single weekend.
4. Beware the Kool-Aid. Not the proverbial Kool-Aid, the banal one. Startup Weekend is an athletic event: 54 hours of excitement and stress. If you want to perform at your best, you have to take care of your body: eat well & stay hydrated.

If your startup gets off the ground, you may find the following helpful:

• When to fire your cofounders
• Startup Founder Agreements
• Ten rules for better founding teams
• Startup tools