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Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

"Or startup weekends"

Having been to a couple startup weekends, I feel like this behavior would be pretty atypical?

I am aware of how Zaarly was started - Ashton Kutcher was a 'surprise' judge, happened to be a good friend of a co-founder, and subsequent investor. Both founders were Startup Weekend board members. It seemed like a staged event for a company launch.

http://startupweekend.org/2011/03/09/from-zero-to-1mil-in-3-...

Aside from that, have there been others?

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Startup weekends have been suspicious too. Not all of them but some. I have met a lot of awesome people at those events. Some are close friends now. But the whole thing at the end feels like finding out my girlfriend was cheating on me with my best friend.

You can get a sense of that from the first night though. Some I've been to have been full of random ideas, others have been "Hi, I'm the cofounder of X and we're going to add Y feature to the site this weekend!". Sets the tone immediately.

Sorry, but if you are going to a SW to try and win, you are missing the point of SW. I appreciate that for some winning and losing might be the point, but it's been impressed upon me by everyone involved with SW that I've met that if you look at winning as the goal, you're going to have a bad time.

Hackathons and Startup Weekends are all about meeting new people, trying new things, and possibly making new friends. It's about trying to accomplish something and sharing it. At SW, it's about getting help in moving that idea forward, in qualifying the idea.

If you treat it like a win/lose scenario, you are going to lose regardless of the outcome.

If winning is not the point, then why is a win state defined?

Same reason you give trophies to Little League participants - to provide context for the competition. To add something fun that hopefully underscores what is effectively a networking/show-off event.

That's a very good question, and one I wish more hackathons would consider. I've seen one hackathon give prizes at the end totally at random, and some that don't do prizes at all.

You don't define a win state. The event handlers do. Your goals will be different from the event handlers goals. And that's fine. You should have different goals.

What does exploiting a situation to aid a launch have to do with winning/losing? I led a team at one and coached at another and couldn't agree more with your reasons for doing it.

My stance is in this case, by turning it into a publicity stunt it detracted from all the good stuff you mentioned. I'm sure no one cared too much as they got to meet Ashton/Demi and the saw all the glitter of a hot startup being launched.

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