If I see that unusual and fresh approach to a certain problem, if I see the drive, if I see an excellent pitch, if they sell it, if I see the fire in their eyes—that’s what I'm looking for in a winner,” said Maria Yarotska, NEAR Foundation.
Warren: “It's all about that finished product. Is that finished product something that I would want to use? Would I be interested in installing it and actually spending some time with it? The winner needs to be something that catches your eye, has something unique, and has something that differentiates it from the rest of the applications.”
Richard: “I'd say the one that really negatively impacts the score is when they over-indexed on one particular criteria at the detriment of the rest of their submission. The same can be true when you have submissions that are very heavily skewed towards a particular part of the tech stack—when it's extremely back-end heavy kazakhstan telegram screening and has almost no front end, there's no UI.”
Karen: “Ambiguity is a red flag, and also projects that lack detail and code.
I remember a couple of projects where the video intro looked really cool or they built a home page for their project which looked really slick, but then when you dug into the project or their GitHub, it was a lot lighter on code."
"It depends on what the requirements are for the hackathon. In our case, we were trying to have people produce something a little bit more fully baked,” said Karen Bajza-Terlouw, Databricks.
Kelvin: “If we just got our template back. Maybe the submission just changed the background color or something—it's still great from a product perspective because this person tried, but it isn't great from a judging perspective.”
Maria: “Devpost is very valuable because you can go to a person's profile and see the history of the hackathons they participated in. If I see the same project with a different label or slightly different interface, it looks like they are just looking for a problem for their solution, that could be a red flag for me.
Also, a really big team is not a red flag but… pinkish. I try to avoid bigger teams because I know for a fact that the contribution from each participant was unequal, and there may be a conflict in the bounty distribution stage, which doesn't contribute to the team's stickiness in the ecosystem.”
Warren: “Rehashed ideas that aren't interesting, something that's already been done and already in the market, or is extremely simple. Something that looks like it was a submission just to get a submission out there.”