The Startup Bus Gets Rolling

After days spent preparing their website, their vehicle and their tools, The Startup Bus is rolling, taking the startup weekend format on the road from San Francisco to Austin, in time for the SXSW festival.

The plan is simple – get 25 entrepreneurs on a bus for 2 days and get them to create 5 startups that will be pitched to investors when they arrive in Austin.

The website the team has created is great, showing, amongst other things, exactly where the bus is at all times and displaying geo-located tweets from the trip

You can also keep up to date in real time by following the Startup Bus’ Twitter account.

The bus is the brainchild of Elias Bizannes, an Australian now living in San Francisco, who proposed it on the Silicon Beach Google Group, a leading Australian tech entrepreneur  forum which Bizannes also started, a couple of months ago.

Since then, the support that has come from the Australian tech community (some of who have flown across to the US for the trip) has been amazing. That having been said, it’s not only Aussies on the bus – there’s a large mix of international talent, all looking for what will no doubt be the experience of a lifetime.

The idea has also generated a lot of interest in the media, some positive and some questioning the quality of the startups that will come out of the experiment.

Those critics clearly have missed the point on what the trip is about. I don’t think anybody is suggesting that a world class startup will be created in 2 days, and on a bus – the real point here are the relationships that will be formed and the experience of working under pressure to get something from idea to launch to pitch in 48 hours.

Remember, the trip is only for 48 hours, so make sure you check them out soon.