Hackathons are for losers
Part 1 of a 3 part series on my experience at Startup Weekend SG 2018
Day 1: Meet & Greet
As the clock ticked to 6 it was time for all the participants to slowly start rolling in. We were greeted at the entrance of the building by young cheery-eyed volunteers happy to show us in using colourful balloons as a guiding beacon. We were led to a typical registration desk where we were split up in groups based on our names. The balloons got bigger and shinier as did the light in everyone’s eyes. Behind the desk was a wall stacked up with goodies to gear us up for the weekend to come. “If anything”, I thought, “I was definitely going to make up for my ticket price based on the goodies and food on offer alone!”. Armed with a lanyard around my neck and bag full of surprises, I entered the arena. I didn’t really know anyone so I kind of hung around with Merryl and her friends. She told me that they were entering as a team and had an amazing idea that they would push to the finish.
They were super pumped but me, not really.
I had seen my fair share of the startup circus after having been to loads of events in the past year alone. They had the usual group of volunteers and organizers with their proud crew t-shirts and super helpful style. The room was lit up like a concert and the food table was, as usual, the best hangout to talk to people for no reason in particular. “Aah… I got this”, was my inner blurb as I rolled my eyes and got comfortable. Typical words for a privileged member of the founder’s only club. I didn’t bother talking to anyone too much as I checked out the goodies I was carrying. What I saw actually surprised me. Inside was a laptop bag full of everything from T-shirts and a water bottle to a hand towel and toothpaste. “Did they really expect us to camp here all weekend? No, thanks!”. I got bored and got up to grab some food and start a conversation or two. I had to talk to some people if I was going to get through this. I met someone I knew from an event we had organized in the past and got to know their friends too. I took my usual stance of introductions and talking about what I do at The Startup Buddy. Secretly, I was hoping we could all just get on with it and the organizers could get to the part where they explain what the rest of the weekend would go like. You could call it, ‘enthusiasm’ but of a different form…
I saw a bunch of familiar faces in the crowd as we all finally settled down to hear what was to come. I gotta say, settled was the opposite of what we really did. If I remember correctly, we started out with a crowd mixing exercise. It was literally a game of patty-cake that you play with the person next to you. I was embarrassed at first, but seeing how alive everyone felt got me going too. We then played a game of mega rock-paper-scissors. All winners would go on to play the game with the next person and all losers would join forces with the winners. In the end there were only two who would battle it out for nothing but the sheer glory of a room full of people cheering them on. It was much more fun than I thought! By the end of it, I was shouting my lungs out for our guy and I didn’t even know why. That’s how they get you!
Once the energy was high and the audience was actually responding to the people on stage, they took us through the drill. Tonight, our goal was to form a team based on an idea. That’s it. I wished they had told us sooner so I would have actually talked to some more people. Well, they had accounted for sceptics like me. The whole audience was split up into 2 groups so I no longer had the choice to stick it out with Merryl. My group was taken to a separate space where we played another game of what I now formally nominate to be called Imitation Celebration (it’s never gonna catch on, I know…). It was juvenile to the max but by this point, I had lost all hope of playing it cool and pretending that I was better than this because, frankly, it was fun! I had decided to sit back, correction, stand up and enjoy the ride (That’s how they get you, strike 2).
Then they ran us through another exercise to get the mental juices flowing. On the projection screen were 50 unrelated absurd words. We had to form groups of 5 and a leader was nominated by chance. The leader selected two of the words on the screen and we came up with a startup idea based on those words alone. The idea had to be for a company 50 years in the future. Only the most creative would enjoy this. Lucky for me, I love hypothetical startup concepts. Our leader picked easy words though. “Rocket Moon”. We got super excited and came up with what I had then thought to be a mind-blowing idea. We were Uber on the moon. Using the moon as our launch base (because of one-sixth of the gravitational force, duh), we were going to offer shuttle ride-sharing so that even the common man could make the occasional trip to Mars for his inter-planetary conferences. Our fuel costs would be one-sixth of other launches and getting some experience from Space-X our rockets were going to be re-usable. My inner geek was super proud and my outer-self was finding it really hard to maintain some humility. When I learned that this was just an exercise I was a little letdown but of course understood that they wanted real companies to start from this weekend, not fantastical ones.
This was just the appetiser and we moved on to people lining up to make their real pitches to the audience in a bid to form teams. At the start, the gender ratio of the pitchers was truly disappointing. What I did love though, was how the organizers egged all the women in the audience to pitch even their last-minute ideas. I decided to be a solution to this problem and pitched my last-minute idea too (we achieved a 50:50 ratio of men and women pitchers!).
I did a terrible job at appearing humble. My opening line was, “I’m a biologist with a PhD in the field of stem cell research.” Everyone gave me a huge cheer as I moved on to make my pitch in one line. Very few people voted my idea but I still enjoyed the limelight. As a hustler, I was outnumbered and there was very little demand for me. Everyone wanted developers and designers. These were the people who could actually build something in a weekend. The winning pitchers would be the main hustlers for each team anyway. I went from team to team but found very few ideas economically viable. My fundraising radar was on and I eventually had to let go and join a cause that spoke to me, recycling. I made one key observation. Due to the pitch voting system, only the most popular ideas got through and not necessarily the most economically sound ones. Nonetheless, grudgingly, I told my team leader that I would give his idea a shot. Terms and conditions applied. I gave him the responsibility of backing up his social enterprise concept with a solid foundation of business strategy.
In his team were his colleague from work, a developer and half a vote from one more team member who had sworn his best bud that they would only do this if they went through the weekend together. It was brutal, but we broke them up and stole the enthusiastic one. Sad to say, his friend dropped out of the hackathon altogether. So there we were 4 guys, 1 girl and a whole lot of questions to answer. We kicked off with the loudest group huddle, skipped dinner and went straight home to bed (except for the young enthusiast, who planned to camp the whole weekend).
Why? Because hackathons are for losers…
P.S. That wasn’t the end. We decided to get some good sleep after a long night (10.30 pm tops) to meet the next morning at 8 am. I was liking how this team thought about things already…
…To be continued
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