[gailees]

They said the same thing to me about hackathons when we did 300, then 500, then 1000, then 2000. And I still think hackathons could scale more and benefit from doing so.

But it seems as if no one is bold enough to do so. YC is.

This quote from Sama echoes through my head constantly: “The central learning of my career so far has been that you can and should scale up things that are working. The power of scale, and the emergent behavior that sometimes comes from it, is tremendous. I think about the potential energy of future scale for every investment I make. Most people seem terrible at this, so it’s another bug you can exploit.”

[Areibman]

In my experience, hackathons don't scale. The value is lost when the resources are spread too thinly across hundreds or thousands of attendees. Mentors can't teach, and hackers can't get feedback. It becomes impossible for meaningful discussions to arise, and winners start optimizing for all the wrong things (i.e. fancy slideshows, needlessly complex designs, worthless ideas) because nobody ends up solving real problems. Worse yet, the hosts celebrate all the wrong metrics such as attendee count and lines of code written, as if those mean anything.

As a prospective YC applicant, I see every batch size increase as a dilution to the value of the incubator. Most of YC's content is already free online; the key value is the personalized insights from partners, access to a professional network, and co-experiencing starting a company with other early stage founders. These sorts of things scale linearly, at best.

[tlb]

In almost everyone's experience, almost everything doesn't scale. Figuring out how to make something scale is a rare event.

I say this having heard, while debating the potential of various startups, probably 10000 arguments for or against something being able to scale. In the end, no amount of wisdom makes you very good at predicting it. Everything doesn't scale until someone figures out how to make it scale. So you bet on smart, energetic founders to figure it out.

Often the scalable version looks different than the initial version. Maybe the million-person hackathon looks more like Repl.it than a room with laptops and teetering stacks of half-empty pizza boxes.

[hertzrat]

I take part in a decent number of game jams. A jam with 10-60 people is fun. A jam with 1000 people isn’t any different than just programming on your own, there are too many people to get a nice community vibe going. In small jams you make friends and chat constantly

[dadrian]

Did the larger hackathons have any benefit, besides to prime the organizers for PM and "growth hacking" positions?

Thinking back to MHacks 2013, I know of more companies started by people who could have, but chose not to attend MHacks, than came out of the hackathon. And that's assuming company creation is even a good metric! I also don't know of _any_ company that thinks they have a good ROI on recruiting.

Perhaps no one is bold enough to do larger hackathons because they've realized hackathons are sham to inflate the organizers resumes.

[arduinomancer]

Meh

Large hackathons are worse for the participants

< 50 people actually feels like having fun hacking around

The huge ones feel super commodified these days, like it’s just an advertising/recruiting opportunity for the sponsors.

It’s like if you were interested in Chess, would you want to join a 2000 person chess club or a 30 person one?

[enumjorge]

> you can and should scale up things that are working

That may be, but I think another bug is not knowing when to stop scaling. Few things (if any) can sustain unbounded growth.

[taldridge]

Doesn't this presuppose that what works with n things will work equally well for 1000 * n things?

For example, the artisan workshops of Paris worked really well at making things but it turns out that they couldn't be scaled up to produce at an industrial scale.

[loceng]

The issue is a lack of leadership who're given adequate resources to reach a self-sustaining point - especially difficult as you're competing with relatively dumb money of the current status quo VC-finance industrial complex who're looking to maximize returns in 10 year periods, to pump and dump while putting as much pressure - extracting as much value as possible - from society.

If you extend the time horizon to 20-50 years with the right system, policy, and protocols in place to allow an exponential growth path - then you'll be "laughing to the bank;" Elon Musk is on this path because he understands the holistic, foundational principles, and the only limitation of how much he'll guide or lead success is his organizational and emotional regulation skills (stress management etc).

YC sees the path and has been working on organizational structures, created a great funnel for themselves. Elon similarly built up his nest egg through the work he's done and subsequent sales and paydays he's had - to then invest the substantial necessary investments into Tesla and SpaceX. It's really incredible to study to find the insights and nuances of how these seeds form and out of all the seeming chaos and pressures they can sprout, start blooming. The odds seem impossible, they however make it through the rigidity and conservation of the status quo - creativity seeming to lead the way for progress.

Great quote, thanks for sharing.

[ralusek]

A difference in magnitude is a difference in kind.

2-5 people is a conversation

5-15 is a dinner party

15 - 200 is a party

200+ is an event

You aren't guaranteed to be able to scale things and maintain fundamental dynamics.