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The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
41–43 of 43 posts
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#42> Likewise, students say hackathons are an ideal way to test-drive the experience of working at a start-up before committing to a job. I don't really understand this. Working at a startup is not about sleeping 2 hours a night and/or churning out a new products in 36 hours. It is about committing to an idea for years and continuing to persevere when everything goes wrong and things look horrible (which is inevitable).…
Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.
Ship something and iterate.
The thing that makes me crazy about hackathons is that they reinforce the school mentality of "I am going to do a thing for a small amount of time, get some approval, and then ignore it forever." For people doing anything real, it's poisonous.
I would much rather see people commit to a semester of weekly demos with the understanding that they were supposed to ship to real users by week 4 at the latest. Then the goals would all be about improvement. More users, better service, more polished product. That's the essence of startup life.
If people really want to do a weekend thing, I'd much prefer something like Lean Startup Machine, an event I occasionally mentor at. There the weekend isn't about building, it's about iteratively testing customer and product hypotheses. It basically ignores the tech side of tech startups and is mainly about customer development.
I think that's a great choice for novices to understand startup mentality because it teaches you that a) you know nothing until you have proof from your customers, b) your notions about your business are probably wrong, and that c) the best way to deal with that is to find out as soon as possible so you can get better notions.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different. Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at hackathons. Having some small stuff so people fee…
Given that student pitch-a-thons (ex: business plan competition type events) can earn you pretty decent amounts of money, how much longer till hackathons on college campuses fall the way of corporate hackathons? As food for thought, there are "Consulting Case Competitions" for business school students year round, and some students decide to spend their time optimizing for winning a bunch of these one after another al…
I go to a lot of student hackathons and I really don't see that happening. And the large majority of organizers are heavily focused on creating a welcoming event for building, learning, and having fun.
Student hackathons are and always will be fundamentally different from corporate hackathons because the motivations of the organizers and attendees are different. Perhaps we should be careful about offering large prizes for the reason you state but the focus is very clearly on learning and building and that's not set to change.