Sixteen days in the Catskills, New York, Friday, October 2 to Saturday, October 17. The shape is fixed and the detail is not.
Half of it gets rewritten by what the teams find in week one. Flick through the acts to read what we will admit to so far.
Arrival, day 01
Everyone arrives, settles in, and starts pushing outward inside the same week. The first days are about volume rather than polish: conversations with real people, ideas tested in public, offers written and thrown away by dark. By the end of it every team has something live and a much shorter list of things they still believe. Nothing is precious yet, and that is the entire point of putting it first.
Build block, 2am
Whatever got a reaction becomes the only thing anyone touches. Teams cut the rest and spend the longest uninterrupted build blocks of the fortnight turning a signal into something a stranger would pay for. The story gets rewritten to match, because most of what sounded good in week one does not survive contact with an actual customer.
First dollar in
A number goes on it, well before anybody feels ready to ask for one. Outbound starts in earnest and first revenue tends to land somewhere in this stretch, rarely from the customer the team had in mind. Whatever the market breaks gets repaired in the open that same week, on camera, with everyone else watching.
Pitch day, one room
Everything narrows. Distribution past the first easy customers, then rehearsal, where the pitch gets said out loud twice and cut in half. The last full day is one room, investors in it, one shot each and the cameras still running. In the morning the vans leave and you go home with whatever you built.
