Chinat · September 5, 2026
A Hackathon Is a Deposit, Not an Event
Xisen is hosting an online hackathon this week. It starts Sunday, submissions close Wednesday, and somewhere in the middle of our Saturday call he asked whether it could run on MentorMates too. Not instead of his own setup. In addition. He wanted our audience, a dedicated track with prizes, and the judging tools.
My first question was the operator's question: would people actually submit on MentorMates and tag it there. His answer reframed the whole thing. "This could be the starting point that we explore together," he said. They are building an open source project for people to build on, and the way you grow a community around something like that is not one launch. It is "a lot of hackathons that accumulate."
That word, accumulate, is the one I have been thinking about since.
Most people treat a hackathon as an event. You plan it, you run it, you post the winners, and the weekend is over. Seen from the inside, that is exactly how it feels. But the value of an event is what is still there on Monday: the builders who now know each other, the ones who come back for the next one, the project that keeps going. The event is the interest payment. The deposit is the community that accumulates underneath it.
Seen that way, Xisen's ask is not a favor between friends. It is two accounts agreeing to compound together. His side brings an open source base people can build on and the community he is trying to grow around it. Our side brings the platform: an audience of around 2,000 people, a proposed track with about $200 in cash and $800 in SharedOS Cloud credits, judging, and potential automated project interviews if they want them. My answer was short. We will publish it to all our people.
The reason I could say yes fast is that the trade is symmetric in kind, even if the numbers differ. He gets distribution and tooling. We get a hackathon we did not have to design, running on our rails, feeding builders into the same place the last one did. Neither of us has to grow the whole thing alone. If it works, we do it again, and the community that shows up for the third one is the sum of the first two.
The same logic showed up on my side of the call. The AI-for-VCs class I taught Thursday went well. Twenty-one people attended, and two of them already want follow-up calls. What I told Xisen about next week was blunt: the goal is to have those conversations with the investors and convert one of them. A class is also a deposit. The event was Thursday. The account is the follow-up calls this week.
And the piece I am shaping up is the least visible one: joining forces with a newsletter on the education side, for promotion and distribution of the classes. A class that only reaches the people I personally message is an event. A class that reaches a list is a deposit, and hopefully a reliable revenue stream. I have been slow to admit that distribution is the thing to build. This call made it obvious from the outside, because I watched someone else ask for exactly that from me.
One more thing Xisen said stuck. Asked what his week looked like, he named one goal, launching his new product, and then said the thing he had been consolidating all week was how important focus is. "That is the only way to win, actually, to focus on something that matters and then put all the effort in." He said it about his own research. It applies to hackathons too. You do not accumulate by running everything. You accumulate by running the same thing, well, in the same place, until the deposits are bigger than the events.
This week, my goals are to convert one VC conversation and sort out the education partnership. Next Saturday I will know whether the deposit theory held.
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