Yeah, my problem with hackathons is that too many people treat them like they are a beginning point of a startup. Hackathons are to startups as martial arts to

Yeah, my problem with hackathons is that too many people treat them like they are a beginning point of a startup. Hackathons are to startups as martial arts tournaments are to the martial arts. You get good at the tournament by training for tournaments. But that's maybe 5% of what it takes to be really good at the overall practice. And in most cases, to get really good at the tournament, you have to do things that are only useful in tournaments and are actually anti-productive in real-life scenarios. I still do weekend prototyping sessions, especially on my own, and there is a lot of value to that, so long as it's understood to be about learning. But from most of what I've seen about hackathons, that's not why people are being asked to come to them, and that's not why people are there.