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Startup Bus: Bootcamp for Tech Entrepreneurs

By In Technology

Adapted from my 2018 Ignite Talk

For most people in the tech world, life can be fairly drab They sit in cubicles, at insurance companies, writing code, designing their millionth, mind numbing button, or making cold calls to hostile schmucks all day. It’s a job right? Something you have to be paid to do, because no one in their right mind would do this for free.

On the other hand, we have the guys in Silicone Valley, wrapped in hoodies and self righteousness, planning on getting rich and changing the world (not necessarily in that order). But how do you get from cubicle to your dream? Working on what you love?

“I’m never doing this again”

I would like to tell you about one the best dumb ideas of recent history: The StartupBus. A Navy Seal boot-camp training program for tech entrepreneurs. Or so I like to think.

In 2010, my friend Elias, was working in Venture Capital, and wanted to get a bus with a bunch of friends and go to South by South West – the huge film, music and tech conference in Austin. He thought would be funny to semi-mock Startup Culture in Silicon Valley by having everyone on the bus try and build a tech startup in the three days it would take to get there from San Francisco.

It sounded crazy to everyone, but they all had so much fun, that a group of them decided to turn it into a “my-city-is-better-than-your-city” tournament the following year. They all went back to their respective states, and started recruiting riders for a full-blown competition. 

The format is simple: 30 strangers get selected to get on a bus, as long as they are extremely competent and fall into one of three clichéd categories: Hipsters Hackers, and Hustlers: Graphic designers, Computer programmers, and Marketing and Business Development people.

They then get on the bus day one, introduce themselves, and pitch an idea for a startup. Groups then form around the ideas, and then the teams work like crazy, for three or four days, to make an actual business. With REAL products, and even Customers – In three days!

I was first invited to ride the 2011 Miami bus. I worked on two separate teams, competed against 10 other busses, 60 other teams,  and didn’t sleep for four days, and met some of the most amazing people that are still in my life to this day.

Since then, the competition has grown. There are more and more busses every year from more cities, a separate European competition, and I’ve recently gotten back from the inaugural StartupBus Africa trip, which was epic! But why would anyone do this?

Well, most people are just… terrible at their jobs. I assume you’ve found this yourself. But the bus is different. The sheer caliber of the people you meet if off the charts. Everyone works so hard, and is so good at what they do, that there is a feedback loop of inspiration; You WANT to work harder to show that you belong. 

The result is productivity to an extent not seen in the real world. What can you create on a bus in three days? How about a fully fledged, artificial intelligence food ordering system that will automatically order you lunch every day? Yeah, we did that. 

Nomscription – Built in three days. On a bus.

Internet free chat system for disaster areas? Yup. A career matching system for Veterans? Check. Customized cereal delivered to your door? Yup. A full social network for selling what you grow in your back garden – a team from Tampa built that!

And there are hundreds of others. But the bus isn’t all flowers and roses. In fact it is totally awful. And that is one of the reasons it’s so successful. If you can build something amazing in three days next to a chemical toilet, you can do anything.

There is bad food, motion sickness, team melt downs, spotty power and internet access, and every new hell you’d find in a real startup, but compressed into the equivalent of a long weekend.  As a result, you learn to be flexible, to deal with the chaos, and to thrive.

Then there is the physical side.  Try having a normal conversation after writing code for ten hours doing this. Also, after four days without sleep, you can have some pretty inspiring insights, as well as some mind-blowing hallucinations. Not to mention all the caffeine and alcohol.

The pure squalor of the situation, combined with the amazing team work that goes on, binds you so closely to those people, that you instantly have 30 new best friends. I started referring to the processes as entrepreneurial Stockholm Syndrome. 

But the process opens your eyes. A passionate, five person team, working 16 hour days, for four days straight, produce 320 hours of actual work. That’s an equivalent 40 work days of super productivity. 

If you can build a complete product, create marketing materials, pitch decks, business cards, have customers and sales, etc., all in three days, ON A BUS, what could you do if you gave yourself six months?

I bet that you’re pretty amazing. You just can’t begin to realize how freaking amazing you REALLY ARE until you’ve HAD be amazing waste deep in crap and sleep depravation. There are no excuses. Go and build something, right now!

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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The State of AI-Coded Software, May 2025

In Software, Technology

I’ll probably regret writing this. At the very least, I’ll cringe reading it in a few months. But here we are.

Lately, we’ve been getting a wave of client requests asking us to evaluate software they built using AI tools. These aren’t engineers. These are business folks using increasingly powerful AI products to try and build functioning systems. And to be completely honest, the results are both impressive and a bit alarming.

People are building whole applications on their own. Backends, frontends, user interfaces, even some database logic. Sometimes they even look good. These are smart people who don’t know how to code but have managed to produce working systems.

The problems show up immediately when we start reviewing the internals. The code is usually a mess. In many cases, it would be extremely difficult to maintain or extend. And if you need to move that code from the platform it was created in to a cloud provider like AWS, you’re going to hit a wall. These platforms wrap everything in layers of scaffolding that make portability a nightmare.

Security is worse. We’ve found plaintext credentials scattered across files. We’ve seen SQL injection vulnerabilities that shouldn’t even be possible in modern frameworks. We’ve seen structural issues that would get flagged in a freshman CS class.

Despite all that, what people are creating are legitimate prototypes. They’re functional. They run. But when you’ve put a few weeks into building something, and you show it to a software engineer, it’s hard to hear that your shiny new thing needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

I want to be clear. I am not anti-AI. Almost everyone at my company uses AI tools every day. We use Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, Claude, and more. We build out frontends with tools like v0 and Lovable. These tools have changed how we work.

Some of our engineers report productivity improvements of 30 to 40 percent. That’s not a rounding error. That is a major shift. But they are still writing the code. They are reviewing it. They are checking for performance, clarity, security, and maintainability. They are not letting the tools decide architecture. They are using AI like they use autocomplete or linters, but with more power behind it.

This is also where expectations need to be adjusted. These systems will not save you 90 percent on development. They will not let you skip engineering altogether. But if they save you 30 percent, that’s a real gain. Imagine you’re building a house. The general contractor says it’s going to be $500,000. You tell them you already did the blueprints, filled out all the permits, and figured out the site plan using some AI tools. If they came back and said, “Alright, I’ll knock 30 percent off,” that would be the best deal of your life. That’s where we are today with AI-generated software. A solid start. A real value. Not a replacement.

For me personally, AI has made it fun to write code again. I haven’t been a working programmer in over a decade, and most modern toolchains are enough to scare me off. Now, with the right assistance, I can build something without getting stuck on Docker configs and dependency mismatches. That’s a big deal.

In the startup world, AI-first development is everywhere. Most of the current Y Combinator batch is using AI tools to write the bulk of their code. But those teams are highly technical. These are engineers using better tools, not tools replacing engineers.

So for non-developers using AI to build products, here are three things you should keep in mind:

  1. These tools are great for building prototypes. If you build something yourself, you will understand it better and will be a better partner to your engineering team. That matters.
  2. These tools can help you build usable frontend components. You probably won’t want to go live with them, but they can get you close enough to work with a real development team.
  3. If your app is small, non-critical, doesn’t store sensitive data, and lives entirely in its native platform, you can probably keep it running. That’s fine for internal use or personal projects.

One day, you’ll be able to speak an app into existence and deploy it with a voice command. It will be fast, secure, and beautiful. But today, you still need an experienced software engineer to check your work before you send real data through it. That’s just where we are right now.

The upside is huge. We can now get experts from other domains to build working prototypes and test ideas without needing an engineering team on day one. That’s powerful. But if your product is going to handle sensitive data or support real users, bring in someone who knows what they’re doing. Not because the AI is bad. Because the stakes are high.