ggopman

Nice

Yea... we had some problems with ATX last time. We're switching things up with a completely new organizing team and venue this time around. It's not easy to throw these big hacks, so I have to be a little forgiving with our first time organizers from past. That said, we will get it right and things in Austin will be awesome like they are in most other cities.

Yea... we should definitely be considering teaching people how to utilize frameworks for languages they already know (PhoneGap, Blackberry OS, Appcelerator). We started with Android and iOS because at scale it's easier to find teachers for those than the others. It would be great if we could garner more support from PhoneGap, Appcelerator, Blackberry, etc

Hey Potato, that's sad you don't want to go to hacks anymore. Code reviews are either done in private before we announce the winner or within 7 days after the event.

The slide deck thing is a persistent problem and one we're not happy with. I think that kills it for everyone and its disappointing when judges are impressed by them. To change this, starting this Fall we'll be the first hackathon to disallow power point presentations and require teams to demo if they'd like to win.

Hi,

I'm the founder of AngelHack, we organize large hackathons around the world and I can tell you this article doesn't hold true for us (though I can't speak for other events). We operate independently of companies and choose winners based on hour things-- Completeness, Impactfulness, Technical difficulty, and viability. We had some issues in our early days with pre-done code, so now all winning teams are subject to code reviews after winning (and in the case where the review shows previous work has been done, we contact the second place winner and invite them to our finals event instead. We do this discretely as to not shame the initial winner who sometimes may not have understood the rules). I'd say this happens 5% of the time, so this is very much the exception and not the rule.

I started AngelHack so that people could have a shot of getting exposure for their ideas and support in taking them to the next level. We welcome everyone to our events, startups who want a good environment to team build and work on new things to indie-devs looking for an outlet from their typically work week. Normally, great coders win and great ideas come out of it. Our mission from there to provide support and mentorship, so top teams have a fighting chance at turning their hack into a startup. Many companies raise funding after they win our events and we're proud of that. They literally start at our events and now they are in YC, TechStars, AngelPad, and you name it. That's cool. With 35 cities happening concurrently, sometimes the quality of what judges pick can vary, where even I myself have had WTF moments on who won, but the majority of our judges pick solid winners and if I see something was really awesome, I'll still invite that team into our finals, regardless of what the judges choose.

My take on corporate hackathons -- most award winners based on who has spent the most time digging into the API and asking good questions to the company -- these would be teams who helped them improve their product and teams that they'd like to believe will finish their product so they can showcase it on their app-store// dev-site. Again, I can't speak for everyone, but that's the trend I see.

And for Startup Weekend, they don't throw hackathons. They do a business plan event, where they don't really care what comes in or comes out. It's about uniting the community and doing customer development on ideas. They judge based on who they feel has improved and who makes the the crowd happy. It's not really a competition.

All this said, I'm curious what people think hackathons should be judged on. Imagine you were giving away $10,000 -- how would you decide? Would you do it on what's cool, based solely on the tech, based on what could make revenue, based on the teams passion for what they are doing? Solve that, and AngelHack would gladly integrate it in with our events worldwide. Again, currently we judge based on Completeness, Impactfulness, Technical difficulty, and viability.

Salsa, the offer was to receive a free ticket with your upvote. There was no incentive to vote more than once.

Hi Thrown,

This is Greg from AngelHack. Everything you said is valid and I thank you for your feedback. We'll organize over 100 hackathons this year and while we work with venues for 8 weeks to ensure they're up to speed, train organizers on weekly calls, and oversee that everything is A-grade, we still have some problems. We've scaled fast, re-placed organizers that weren't top notch, and cut ties with venues that couldn't handle Wi-Fi caps that they promised us they could. We're a startup, and like any startup, we move fast and cut the shit out of the way as soon as it forms.

What you went through last summer was the first iteration of our pre-accelerator. We knew there would be holes and we knew the only way to truly understand it was to do it. We took no equity from your class because we wanted to make sure we added enough value first. At this point we're confident that we are.

We've built a new system for identifying good mentors, following up with them, and have hired 2 new members to oversee things for you. Sorry you had to be a guinea pig, but you lost nothing in the process and got a free trip out to Silicon Valley and the chance to show top VC's your work...

Hi SCC!

You are correct, I can't code (yet!). But all my best friends are coders and I think on the same wave-length. Starting this year we'll be building out a network of code schools, which I hope to participate in. In the meantime, I'm happy adding value to your community wherever I can.

Hi r25,

Greg from AngelHack here. The equity stake we take is 2%. This allows us to be sustainable and continue building this program. This accelerator (should be called a pre-accelerator), is designed to get people connected to the Valley from around the world and get them pre-pared for entering legit programs like Y-Combinator. We'll never be better than them, nor are we trying to be. We're only trying to assist you get to the glory land.

If you can get ready for these programs without our help, then you're on the right track. Most of the companies that come out from our hackathons are 2-3 days old and need A LOT of guidance. Technically they're very strong, but they need support with legal issues, founder issues, idea validation, product/market fit, viral engagement loops, guerrilla warfare marketing tactics, networking and pitch help, and help raising funding. We help them get through all that.

Hi Maffy, glad you had a great time. We're working on the 2 minute limit rule and some creative ways to speed up demos. We hate ushering people off-stage when they've worked so hard and yammer about on the demo... alas it is something we need to do though.

Hi aashay, you are completely correct, we are designed to be a feeder system into other accelerators! We're not trying to re-invent the wheel here, only help great teams prepare for getting into them. We should have branded this more as a pre-accelerator to be honest (any PR people out there looking for a job?)

For 12 weeks of mentorship, 2 weeks in SF, all our connections, help getting into "legit" programs, tickets to Disrupt, and potentially a booth at Disrupt, we take 2%. That makes us sustainable, which is all we're trying to do. We pay for everything out of our own pocket. AngelHack is a bootstrapped company that has scrappily built out our communities around the world without the help of organizations like Kauffman, that could give us the funding to allow us to pay for everyone to stay longer.

No doubt, there is a better way things can be done. But with our current resources, our goals are to do what we can to provide the most value to the community in a sustainable way.

Hi George,

Greg from AngelHack here. Thanks for the pro-tip. HN is still a black box to us and I appreciate your tips on successful protocols for using it. We didn't incentive people to create "sock puppets," only to vote once from their personal accounts in return for a free tick. Myself, like everyone else, is looking for ways to hack the system (HN is now a big part of that system and how we distribute information to the community).

It sounds like you understand things much better than us. If you'd ever like to chat I can be reached at greg@angelhack.com

Hi Error,

This is Greg from AngelHack. We have nothing to do with said "shell" accounts, nor did we give anyone incentive to make shell accounts. We offered our community free tickets to our next event if they helped us with up-votes (our definition of a successful product launch).

There was no incentive to vote more than once. But like with any community, we have our more passionate users that go above and beyond to try and help us succeed. It looks like that is what's happening here.

Hi this is Greg from AngelHack. I'm not sure if someone posted that or if that's just your personal comment. If you're interested, we act more as a pre-accelerator, designed to get people ready for incubators like Y-Combinator, TechStars, or AngelPad. We've helped teams make connections before and we've built this out so we can continue to help teams. We're doing our part in the larger eco-system, should you ever need our help we'll be there for you to.

The Sparrow team hard at work

Hackathon.io will be coming out with a directory of every hackathon in the U.S. in about 12 days. Signup at hackathon.io and we'll e-mail you more info soon.

Here's a full breakdown on hack sponsorships...maybe it'll make it in your next post ;)

HACK SPONSORSHIPS

Non-college hackathons are sponsored mostly from Platform Marketing departments that want developers to use their toolkits. Inspired by "the greats" like Twilio and 10gen, most developer tool companies are looking for ways to get their tools known and used by developers and are willing to pay to do it. Good examples are: Heroku, Pusher, Apigee, Mashery, Cloudmine, Mailchimp, Box, Firebase, Pearson, New Relic.

Some like Apigee will only sponsor if they can be the top prized API or headline sponsor for the event. Some like Mashery will try to convince you that they don't have money (they do), but that they'll bring a bunch of people to your event (they wont), others like Microsoft will pay if you can integrate an appealing Windows 8 vertical, and then there are those like New Relic who will sponsor if they believe you are doing good for the community and want to show support #nerdlife (this is an extremely rare breed though, so don't count on finding too many like this). There are lots of Platform marketing teams out there with a lot of different budgets and reasons to sponsor. If you can align your hackathon with their initiatives then you can land some good ones.

After that, there's recruiting -- The recruiting bucks come easy if you're a top tier engineering school. Most of the big companies I know only want to hire top devs and will pay for creative ways like this to brand themselves to them. The only non-college hacks a recruiting sponsor will pay for are the mega hackathon events that bring everyone out of the woodworks - (ex. Photo Hack Day, Disrupt Hackathon, AngelHack).

Lastly, there is sponsorships from organizations sponsoring entrepreneurship (Kauffman, BizSpark, Google Entrepreneurship, Ford). These deals normally take 6-18 months, but are completely worth it if you can land one. They cut monster checks (normally 6-7 figures) and will guarantee the growth and sustainability of your event. However, you have to prove you're creating a scalable model for entrepreneurship (ex. StartX, AngelList).

And should all else fail there are ticket sales. If you're scrappily putting your hackathon together, want to see it scale (which means hiring people to help organize), and you don't have big entrepreneurship sponsors onboard yet, then you should probably charge for tickets. Either that or be willing to pay out of your own pocket if ANYTHING goes wrong…. and like most events, it almost always does...

Pen Apps not getting money from UPenn!!! Pulak, I thought your hustle was stronger than that ;)

SHDH is great, but I wouldn't compare it in the same light as the hackathons we're discussing. It's not a weekend long event and you cut corners on getting healthy food, because you have no funding. Not to take away from the great fun of a SHDH, but most developers these days expect a certain level of quality from the hackathons they attend.

Most hackathons, like the Greylock one mentioned, are organized with large budgets in hopes of bringing in talent to find recruits for their companies.

Independently organized hackathons like AngelHack need to charge to ensure long-term sustainability of the event and ensure you're getting certain amenities that you should expect from a quality hack. If you've ever been to a Facebook hackathon you can tell they spend easily 20k between setup, employees, food costs, travel, and prizes.

If PenApps isn't charging yet, then that's because they are being subsidized by UPenn, which is an awesome luxury that most potential organizers will not have.

Great post by Alexey, but I must admit I'm disappointed he didn't incorporate any of the insights we use at AngelHack to sustain hackathons of 400+ attendees( walkie talkies, rated video submissions for cutting down demos, hackathon.io for team building and seamless communications, helicopters and nerf guns for fun, massage tables and endless candy as added amenities).

There's also a lot to be said for the handholding that goes into working with sponsors. Those sponsor dollars don't come as easy as you would think. Perhaps there'll be a follow-up post :)

Very Cool.