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Not to mention it cost $500 to enter, meaning negative EV, not as bad as the lotto, but still a losers' gamble.
This part I just don't get it. Why? Salesforce is not a small startup. It can definitely afford a 100k hackathon.
I hope this hackathon happens again next year. They were very generous with their grand prize, and anything you built you were able to keep. The one thing I'd ask them to change is for the prizes to be a little better distributed this year. I'd hate to be those second place winners who perhaps _just barely_ lost to the first place winners but had a $950,000 dropoff. Perhaps first place $500,000, second place $250,000…
Their prize structure reflects rewards in winner-take-all scenarios, such as the tech industry. How much money is the second-best CRM system making compared to Salesforce?
Day 1: Monday
Came in early 10am-ish. 2nd floor, Moscone West, Hackathon area set up. There was a table. This is where we checked out team in. Room capacity Nightclub lighting. Imagine walking into a nightclub and turning on your computer to work. That's what this setup was like for 3 days! Someone briefly turned on the lights on Wednesday. I am thinking this had to do with Marc and Jim Cramer stopping by.
There was a camera crew with really expensive gear filming some people on day one. Not sure what this was all about.
Day 1 Overnight Food truck around midnight. Dead. You'd think more people would stick around overnight to work on their hacks. I'd say there were at most 20 people. 2 dudes were noticeably snoring towards the sponsor tables in the bags. First red flag.
Keynote day. Hacking continues. Hackers are free to watch the keynote on their laptops despite having "keynote" designation on their badges. Security ridiculously tight everywhere.
I started to get a weird vibe about the whole event. I've been to a few other hackathons (angelhack, disrupt, launch, startup weekend, paypal etc). This one seemed less organized and hacker friendly. They had food (think pizza, soda, and ice cream), but as far as wiring (wifi - shoddy, powerstrips - stationary to long desks, lighting - think nightclub-like, flashing blue, green, purple circles, and mainly event production staff present).
Re: Hack submissions. Instructions were to submit hacks to Challenge Post by 6pm Wednesday. Submissions must include link for a video and meet the rules and requirements. No information was communicated about judging, how finalists would be selected etc.
Waste of my time, money and overall bad vibe from Salesforce.
I'm not sure about Team Selection, whether to have random, pre-determined, or 'quick pitch' style.
Sometimes Hackathons can be a great experience for the participants. Sometimes, however, the evaluation criteria can ruin. We had one of the only functioning projects, but were docked points for using Twilio instead of AT&T's shitty API. (One of the Sensei's even told us to use Twilio.)
I agree that cash prizes should be eliminated from Hackathons. I'm not sure about Team Selection, whether to have random, pre-determined, or 'quick pitch' style. Sometimes Hackathons can be a great experience for the participants. Sometimes, however, the evaluation criteria can ruin. We had one of the only functioning projects, but were docked points for using Twilio instead of AT&T's shitty API. (One of the Sensei's…
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i killed myself to get my entry in. it was another version of healthcare.love. i wish i knew what they were doing so we could team up. i checked my analytics this morning. i was the only one who viewed the official video. i was the only one who launched the app. i'd love to collect the stats from everyone to see how many apps even got played.
It's quite a farce. One can excuse not launching the app (it would require some setup for each individual app), but not looking even briefly at the video is inexcusable. But I'm guessing they already picked the 5 finalists for PR-value well before the entries were submitted, so they didn't want to spend their party-time at Dreamforce doing something so boring as looking at hackathon entries.
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This part I just don't get it. Why? Salesforce is not a small startup. It can definitely afford a 100k hackathon.
Not startup but still losing tons of money.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-coms-revenue-growth...
One of the comments, kinda what I already expected: "Spoiler: One of those guys used to work for Salesforce! (not kidding, they announced it during the demo). The French guys were followed around during the entire hackathon by a salesforce camera crew (I was sitting right next to them, some of the salesforce people even came over to help them submit to be sure they got it in before the last 5 min was up, kinda knew t…