The StartupRiot MAKE event kicked off last night at ATDC with the help of Sanjay Parekh and some very awesome sponsors and teams.

We’re happy to be a part of this awesome event. At 5 pm on Friday, teams started trickling in and sponsors started setting up displays. The food arrived and many people began networking and planning already.

At 6 pm, Sanjay announced the teams, and each team got up and spoke about what they were building, and what they needed – be it a designer, some mobile development help, or back-end development.

There are some awesome prizes, but I am pretty sure the teams that are here, while they are happy to win, are actually here because they enjoy making and building things using technology. You can actually tell, because in addition to building products (we’ve already seen a few working demos), they’re helping each other, offering encouragement, and feedback.

A few of us from Highgroove are here this weekend offering help in the form of knowledge and programming chops. Since we’ve built products and services for companies both big and soon-to-be-big, we’re pretty opinionated about what we’ve seen that works and doesn’t work in a modern web application. Our actual real service, though, that we’re offering is something that comes natural to us: “Just Keeping it Simple” and saying “No” to:

• complicated features (keep it simple!)
• overly generic solutions (hyper-specialize instead)
• building it yourself (instead of leveraging open source)
• scaling too soon (start small, scale later)

Good luck teams!