I have to say that this was probably my favorite Ignite, and it was not because I felt like I succeeded — that’s just the icing on the cake. There were some fantastic presentations that exceeded my expectations and absolutely blew my mind. I laughed, learned, and overall, I really enjoyed myself.

One of the most important things one can learn from building a startup is that having a good idea, but it’s not enough. Other people might’ve already done something with your good idea — and if you can’t do it any better, you might want to move on to the next idea.

I’m sitting here in the Leeds School of Business amongst a sea of people with various kinds of educational backgrounds, talents, and interests who are all here to build a startup from concept to launch before the end of the weekend.

After attending Ignite Boulder 2 and Ignite Boulder 3, I had submitted a topic that was accepted for presentation: “Confessions of a NiteRide Driver” (name altered just slightly to protect the innocent). By the end of the voting, I’d made it to 3rd place. All this talk about wanting to present and thinking I could present would finally be challenged — could I present in front of almost two hundred people?

I must admit that when I first tried the Lindy Hop, I wasn’t very good at it. This was in high school. I didn’t like it at all, actually, and I did it wrong.

I’m really excited about this because I’ve been working for the South Africa Project for something like a month now and have really only used Twitter, Facebook, and to a degree worked on the MySpace and Flickr pages. This has been an opportunity for me to really write.

The most beneficial things I learned in my six weeks of refresher’s classes were probably (finally) the Charleston, some better tricks when dancing Lindy Hop, a more refined triple step, and how not to elbow/get elbowed in the face (um, yeah, happened once or twice…).

Ignite is a series of presentations in which the slides move every 15 seconds, and the presenter has only so many slides available — it makes for a crazy, fast-paced evening of technology, humor, and all-around fun. This was my second Ignite.

An update on my swing dance classes

This week saw a small drop in numbers, but we did gain a few people, and there are a good dozen of us who seem genuinely committed.