I'm not disagreeing with you, not at all really, but I will offer a defense of Startup Weekend. I've participated in 8 or so Startup Weekends, a few as a regul

I'm not disagreeing with you, not at all really, but I will offer a defense of Startup Weekend. I've participated in 8 or so Startup Weekends, a few as a regular attendee, a few as a mentor, and a few as a community organizer. So, I'm speaking from a position of some experience but admittedly, only within the events I experienced in the mid-Atlantic area. I've always viewed Startup Weekend as different from a hackathon. IMO, hackathons should be more like what you're describing, developers getting together and hacking on stuff, a fairly technical focus. Whereas I view Startup Weekend as more an entrepreneur networking event. Yes, you're ostensibly there to create a startup in a weekend, but the real point is to meet people outside of your normal circles, other people who have that ambition to create something. At least, that's how I've always pitched it to developers I encouraged to attend. If you want to have a good weekend, put some effort into picking a good team. The startup idea honestly doesn't matter so much, because it's kind of absurd to think you'll build anything real in a weekend. The startup idea will almost certainly be abandoned after the weekend. So, what really matters is finding a team of people who seem like they'd be fun to work with, people you might enjoy spending an entire weekend with, people you might want to maintain a connection with after the weekend. I also think Startup Weekend is a bit more up front about the focus being the business idea and the pitch, not actually executing on the tech during the weekend. Of course, it can be disheartening when a completely unfeasible idea wins, but that really comes down to the judges. I've often been frustrated by the judging. For example, at one event, one judge was an expert in FinTech; so some decent ideas in that space were shot down as unfeasible, which was probably true. But some equally unfeasible machine learning ideas won, simply because none of the judges had the expertise to evaluate them. All of that said, there are definitely diminishing returns. After you've attended one or two Startup Weekends, you've probably expanded your circle plenty – and if not, then attending a third probably won't change that. I attended so many, because I found the energy of the event to be invigorating. It felt good to be around so many people who were putting energy into creating something new – yes, often something silly/bad/unfeasible, but they were trying to do something different. It's similar to how I feel about software conferences. It's good to attend 1 per year, because it's invigorating to be around so many developers who are passionate about technology and the craft of writing software. But as you attend more, there are rapidly diminishing returns. There are only so many ideas you can explore, only so much you can take away. In years I've attended multiple, I often find myself wishing I had just stayed home and spent the 2-4 days doing some other learning activity, e.g., pick an open source tool I use regularly, really dig into it, and try to contribute back.