Participated in Jason McCabe Calacanis s #launchhack . While the networking was good, the prize advertised as $1.6M was false advertising. The fund was $800k, so even if you had the greatest Hack of all time and all of the fund was given to you, that wouldnt leave any money for the second grandprize winner. Just because you have a $20 bill doesnt mean you can buy two things that cost $20 each. We also got the least qualified judges I have ever had at a Hackathon. It has been a while since I did a hackathon, but our judges left comments so stupid that when the fellow hackers read the comments more than one said in unison, what retards. Retard is not a term I would normally used or endorse. It is on the list of words I band my Youtube Subscribers from using. But when the Hackers know that the judges are clearly stupid, it doesnt inspire them to value the feed back. I took names of 12 people who want to order our bear, one was a security guard, and one was part of the cleaning staff. To me that was success. When a large mean looking gentleman who has spending all day checking wristbands tells you he would part with $150 if he can get your product in the next year you are doing something right. When hackers around you are more mad at the feedback from the judges of your hack than they are that their feed back was critical you know you did something right. A few quick observations.... There were probably 12 people reading Shel Israel and Robert Scoble s Age of Context. There were about 3 wearing glass. The Finalists were almost all groups that did one of two things, started their hack weeks in advance, or were an exact knock off of other companies. 1 had even mentioned they do the same hack at every hack a thon and just change which API they use (they do shopping APIs) Venues for Hackathons should have showers or something. The place stank at the end of Sat, and was awful at noon Sunday. While the Devs were vetted, the APIs werent. I hate to bash the API guys, because the API I am thinking of the people were nice, but The API 500ed all weekend, was documented wrong, and was Down most of the weekend. They ended up manually giving us data so we could fake doing full data. Turned out their API only went live the day before. With no clear rules for judging, judges gave such helpful feedback as You cant do hardware startups with $10k. Well then maybe there shouldnt have been an award for best hardware hack. And Who the Frak said anything about doing a startup for $10k I have more than that in my wallet. The feedback on our hack was This is better suited to kickstarter thats not feedback. Thats stupidity. Why would anyone do a Kickstarter and give up 30% of the gross unless their idea was stupid. You can sell on Amazon with full fillment, but Khols standing right there does a single order larger than a Top KickStarter result. Several VCs told people who used Sponsor APIs there was no use case for the API. Someone should have told them that they shouldnt say bad things about the sponsors. Overall, I would not do this event again. I would not recommend it to others.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 10:18:20 +0000
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