This past weekend marked the beginning of Founder Labs’ first NYC endeavor. Like many other entrepreneur-support programs, Founder Labs aspires to foster the development of start-ups that will change the world… However, Founder Labs differs from other programs in that it focuses on picking people pre-team, and creating a mash-up of individuals’ unique skills and talents.

Part science experiment and part social experiment, the program combines 8 engineers, 4 designers and 4 business-focused people for 5 weeks. The program encourages the development of 4 person teams, and provides tender-loving-care in the form of mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs, investors and mobile experts.

This is the stuff reality TV is made of, but hopefully ours is the uplifting, happy-ending kind of reality TV like Extreme House Makeover vs. the train-wreck, booze-filled dramatics found on the Jersey Shore or the Real World.

So… filled with eagerness and a bit of anxiety (will people like me? who will I sit with at lunch? what if no one wants me on their team?) I, along with 14 of my Founder Labs counterparts, descended on Google’s NY office, which will be home to many of our meetings. The weekend did not disappoint, we had an impressive line-up of speakers:

• Rajiv Patel from Lift Projects – to help us think about product design and idea generation  
• Lars Kamp from Accenture – to give us a very thorough overview of the mobile ecosystem, trends, technology evolution and more (reams of data which warmed my business-focused heart)
• Pankaj Kedia from Intel – to inspire us to think out of the box by giving us a preview of what Intel is focused on in the mobile space
• Ian McFarland from Pivotal Labs – to make us smarter about agile development, platform choice and lean UX
• Dana Kanze from Moonit – to tell us about the ups & downs of early entrepreneurial days

I’ll give special mention to our dinner guest, Naveen Selvadurai - Foursquare co-founder and poster-child of the blossoming NY tech scene (literally, you’ve seen the Gap ad, right?). He fielded our many questions and spoke candidly on how he got started, sans glamour (e.g., quitting his job without a clear idea of what he wanted to do, having to take side jobs to make rent). As I listened to his story, it occurred to me that everyone has to start somewhere.

For our group of 16, we’re starting by getting to know each other, discussing each others’ interests, ambitions and motivations for joining the program. We ‘speed-dated’ this weekend, and now are courting each other to form our teams. Some of the anxiety has begun to subside (I think I made new friends, we all sat at one big conference table for lunch, and there are an even number of people so there’s no way to not get a team). There will be some awkwardness until the team match-making is done, but our fearless leader, Shaherose, has assured us that everything sorts itself out.

Of course we’ve also discussed our ideas, but surprisingly, at this point it’s really not about the idea. We’ve been told, and I believe, that the idea will evolve and change so much over the next 5 weeks that it’s really not that important. What is important is finding complementary people and that very broadly, your areas of interest somewhat intersect. On a very positive note, I found I had interest/work-style overlap with most everyone (good job picking people, Shaherose) which greatly alleviated my team-matching-related anxiety.

Another (pleasant) surprise has been the diversity of ideas and interests that are coming from of my peers. I’m happy to report that Founder Labs NYC is coming up with plenty of ideas with real business models attached, and that not all the ideas center on building a 1M user base before any monetization can occur.

The end result is this – coming out of the weekend, I am feeling very good about my prospects. I’ve been impressed with everyone I’ve met, and though teams are only 4 people, I’m excited to have a community of 15 people that I can lean on, learn from and use as resources over the next 5 weeks and beyond! My hope is that 5 weeks is just the beginning for our new community.

I feel very lucky to be in a group of such talented, interesting, and ambitious people. I’m excited over the next few weeks to build something from nothing…

Sonia Sahney is a former engineer and a semi-professional shopper (10,000 hours+). This combination has fueled her passion for the intersection of digital and retail. Sonia is currently a management consultant based in NYC. She graduated magna cum laude with a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Michigan and has a MBA from Harvard. Follow her on twitter @ssahney.