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I've been to three startup weekends and they seem to vary greatly depending on who puts them on. First one I went to was in a college town in Michigan (East La

I've been to three startup weekends and they seem to vary greatly depending on who puts them on. First one I went to was in a college town in Michigan (East Lansing). The organizer was still a student and so were most of the attendees. It was very much a hackathon with a focus on building something in 2 and half days. My team had an iphone, mac, and web app working and we won "crowd favorite" and "coolest" The second one I did was in Seattle. Lots of developers were there, but the teams that did the best didn't necessarily have the most functional code. Still, everyone had some sort of prototype, many of them quite polished. The third I did was an internal Microsoft Startup Weekend (although still put on by the folks at Startup Weekend). It was dominated by business type people, although there were a decent amount of developers. The judges essentially ignored the fact that anyone had running code and went solely on people's slide decks. As a developer, I enjoyed the first one the most by far.

adastra 14y ago
Responding to top comment, but want to address concerns in several of the replies. FWIW, the event was actually organized by the management of Startup Weekend themselves: Marc Nager, the CEO, and Frank Nouyrigat, the CTO. So I don't think I'm misrepresenting the organization in talking about my experience. It was the recent one at Stanford, you can read about it here: http://stanford.startupweekend.org/ http://stanford.startupweekend.org/ The online application seemed to imply only technical people would be allowed in, which is what led me to think it was a hackathon. It was also restricted to Stanford students and alums. Only later did it become clear that the Stanford business school was one of the co-organizers, and they had secured a large number of the "slots" for their own students. They did have a bunch of designers there also, which is nice. But the event still felt like it had a 4:1 ratio of "people who can think about a business plan" to "people who can build something". More importantly, the judges didn't actually care about whether teams had built anything. Most of them didn't have tech backgrounds - they were there as reps from the sponsors. Startup Weekend is pretty open about the business-ey aspect of their events, so it's my fault for not realizing that in advance. On their website it reads "on average, half of Startup Weekend’s attendees have technical or design backgrounds, the other half have business backgrounds." Still, I think they need to decide what they want to be. If they are going to use judges who could not care less if you actually built something, they need to be open about that up front. Technical people who want to spend a weekend building a product need to know they should stay away. Or, Startup Weekend could require judges to heavily take into account actual product development in their decisions, and try to attract more coders. But as of right now, they are doing the former but still trying to get coders to attend, and for me that was a bad experience.

adastra 14y ago

Responding to top comment, but want to address concerns in several of the replies. FWIW, the event was actually organized by the management of Startup Weekend themselves: Marc Nager, the CEO, and Frank Nouyrigat, the CTO. So I don't think I'm misrepresenting the organization in talking about my experience. It was the recent one at Stanford, you can read about it here: http://stanford.startupweekend.org/ http://stanford.startupweekend.org/ The online application seemed to imply only technical people would be allowed in, which is what led me to think it was a hackathon. It was also restricted to Stanford students and alums. Only later did it become clear that the Stanford business school was one of the co-organizers, and they had secured a large number of the "slots" for their own students. They did have a bunch of designers there also, which is nice. But the event still felt like it had a 4:1 ratio of "people who can think about a business plan" to "people who can build something". More importantly, the judges didn't actually care about whether teams had built anything. Most of them didn't have tech backgrounds - they were there as reps from the sponsors. Startup Weekend is pretty open about the business-ey aspect of their events, so it's my fault for not realizing that in advance. On their website it reads "on average, half of Startup Weekend’s attendees have technical or design backgrounds, the other half have business backgrounds." Still, I think they need to decide what they want to be. If they are going to use judges who could not care less if you actually built something, they need to be open about that up front. Technical people who want to spend a weekend building a product need to know they should stay away. Or, Startup Weekend could require judges to heavily take into account actual product development in their decisions, and try to attract more coders. But as of right now, they are doing the former but still trying to get coders to attend, and for me that was a bad experience.