Judges in non-related sectors determine whether an early-stage gaming studio is ‘better’ than a boot-strapped big data startup.
It's certainly true that watching back to back pitches of very different companies, even in the same general sector, makes me wonder how on earth the judges are supposed to pick a 'winner'. However, it's pretty educational at the end of the day -- numbers matter, perhaps more so than the idea itself? -- any startup can be distilled down into a bunch of metrics and compared against another. It's that ephemeral 'potential' that makes the difference in terms of winning competitions, I think; I also wonder if a startup built purely to win a specific competition would look very different from one built because the founders had deep expertise and genuine passion for a specific problem or area?
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I like this point:
Judges in non-related sectors determine whether an early-stage gaming studio is ‘better’ than a boot-strapped big data startup.
It's certainly true that watching back to back pitches of very different companies, even in the same general sector, makes me wonder how on earth the judges are supposed to pick a 'winner'. However, it's pretty educational at the end of the day -- numbers matter, perhaps more so than the idea itself? -- any startup can be distilled down into a bunch of metrics and compared against another. It's that ephemeral 'potential' that makes the difference in terms of winning competitions, I think; I also wonder if a startup built purely to win a specific competition would look very different from one built because the founders had deep expertise and genuine passion for a specific problem or area?