Touched by the Hackathon: a study on the connection between Hackathon participants and start-up founders

Time-bounded events such as hackathons, code fests and others have become a global phenomenon. Entrepreneurial hackathons in particular have gained wide spread popularity because they come with the prospect to being the grounds where the next billion dollar enterprise is born. There is however limited insight into whether and how hackathons participants and start-up founders are connected beyond studies on singular events focusing on hackathons as a starting point for start-ups. To address this gap we conducted a study on a dataset covering 44 hackathons over three years and 489 start-ups in the North-Eastern European country of Estonia. Our findings indicate that hackathons are not always the start of an entrepreneurial endeavor but can also be useful through later stages as a means to develop future products, find future employees and others. The results presented in this paper are based on an initial analysis of this rich dataset and thus present the starting point of a larger study on the connection between the hackathon and start-up communities which is currently in planning.