alt Hacker NewsOh hey, it's my blog. Weird seeing it posted here.
It's been a while and I now have a lot more context than back when I wrote the post in anger.
Disclaimer: As a result of people I met during the hackathon, I was somehow able to get into Entrepreneurs First, a startup accelerator/residency program and moved from Cardiff to San Francisco. The organizers of the hackathon has lots of ties to people who now fund me. What I say now will obviously be more measured and possibly biased.
There's many types of hackathons, and they exist for different purposes. I went in with the expectation of something similar to Huawei's Tech Arenas where the goal is to find the most technically capable engineers for specific problems (combinatorial optimization, optical network routing, etc) with the ability to communicate tacked on. That is why they're nearly a month long with actual metrics you compete by (latency, profit, etc)
HackEurope is a recruiting pipeline for larger startups and venture capitalists. They are specifically selecting for good pitchers, not technical people (which for them is a dime a dozen)
Having now been in the startup ecosystem for a bit, I can see it playing out very similar to how the hackathon went. Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out.
I still can't believe I'm here and I feel less and less human each passing day. The temptation of capital chips away daily at one's moral compass.
P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.
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The animation in the background is fun, but really impairs readability on mobile. At least there’s Reader mode in browsers, but a pity that the original form isn’t accessible!
is blog page broken or smth?
if I click "Blog" button, there's only 1 entry and it isn't the one posted here
The animation of the background makes this blog very difficult to read :)
Of course most (on-site) Hackathons are best for networking and not for building great software.
> Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out
Yeah. I was an engineer in a startup for a good bit and after a certain point I realized that for us there wasn't any point in actually trying to make working products - a flashy render did so much more than anything working ever would, at least until tens of millions of funding had been raised. Many of the other startups pitching at the same events as us were using off-the-shelf software and saying it was theirs, if they had any demo at all instead of concept renders.
And at that point, having little experience in creating renders, I contented myself with going to conferences, following around my much more charismatic cofounder, and saying tech buzzwords to make the business types smile. They sure love their AI. More than one conference we went to had an itinerary of talks where literally every talk title had "AI" in the name.
I don't think it was a waste. I learned people skills, I can talk to a crowd, pitch ideas confidently to men in suits full of the right words if I have to, and I do think on some level it is actually the right call to not build. Whatever I would have hacked together with me and whoever else was around would not have been the basis for a good product and probably would have calcified bad decisions anyways - better to raise capital before building.