This month, I participated in an epic hack trip on the “StartupBus” — and it was the 12th hackathon I’ve been a part of in as many months.

I love everything about hackathons. The idea of simultaneously building relationships, teams and products for a fleeting moment under various constraints is fascinating, exciting and educational — and most of all, fun.

But post-judging, participants typically feel disillusioned. When they don’t win, the team is bitterly disappointed. When they do win, they argue over who gets what part of the prize. It happens nearly every time.

I’ve watched this again and again, and thought, “Isn’t this just about having a good time? Just relax!”

On the StartupBus from San Francisco to Austin, I got to know lots of brilliant, friendly people and was inspired by the ideas and passion of every team involved in the event. For those unfamiliar, it’s an annual 72 hour hackathon on a bus ride to the tech conference SXSW.

If there’s a better way to transition from a group of strangers to a tight-knit group of friends in 72 hours, I have yet to see it. From the lack of sleep to the sprints of work to the downtime without internet to the confined space to the rest stops to the steady stream of alcohol to the hard, looming deadline; everything about StartupBus seems designed to make you walk away with some new best friends.

As the week progressed, six buses from six cities converged in San Antonio. Emotions, stress and energy fluctuated aggressively. After the first round, half the teams were eliminated. After the second round, half the teams were eliminated. In the final round, 8 teams remained — mine included.

Each time we progressed, I was thrilled to see my team move forward, but disheartened to see the road end for other teams that worked just as hard as we did. And after each round, there was more chatter of disillusionment around the whole event. In some cases it was petty, while in others totally justified (as was the case for the teams Robert Scoble was admittedly disrespectful to.)

In the final hours, my team rallied and got really excited about our prospects in the event. We perfected phrases, designed a pitch deck, planned transitions and talked about what would happen if we won. Then we lost.

Shortly after, we joined in on the negativity party. “The judges didn’t understand our product vision,” we said. One brilliant losing team had built an anonymous chat platform called Ghostpost, so without missinga beat they created a #losers room where we could all complain behind the cloak of anonymity. One person even complained on StartupBus’ public blog. Nearly every losing team was complaining about something, myself included.

It took me a bit to realize that I was engaging in the same exact behavior I’ve watched with bemusement at past hackathons.

Once I realized that, I looked around me. I saw a group of people whom I know will be successful as they push onward, because I’ve seen them go through hell and still come out on top.

Suddenly, I was smiling again. The event was never about prizes and pitches and organizers and judges and equity. It was hardly even about product development and traction. StartupBus was about people and shared experience, and I got my fair share of each.

I’ll never forget being in a taxi at four in the morning with five people from five different countries, all of whom made the bold decision to go out to the San Antonio bars despite having slept just a handful of hours in several days. I’ll never forget working until 6am in a random town in New Mexico, as the rising sun glistened on the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Chili Pepper” outside the hotel.

Most importantly, I often think about that ephemeral moment when I came together with three strangers and nothing mattered except moving our project forward, regardless of the outcome. Those strangers are now my friends.

Next time you find yourself at a hackathon, consider this: If you and your team want that first place iPad Mini so badly, couldn’t you find a couple of hours of contract work and buy it? If that decidedly easier path to the prize isn’t as alluring, then think for a minute about why you’re participating in the hackathon.

And if you win, great. Winning is fun, and the aspect of competition is key in making hackathons fun. Of course, I wish I had won StartupBus.

But if you participate in hackathons just to win hackathons, then you’re missing the point.

Austin Smith is the community manager at Singly, a service for transmitting personal data between applications. 

Follow him on Twitter @awwstn

photo credit: hackNY via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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StartupBus is a hack week with a twist: you board a bus filled with strangers, and 1800 miles later, you’re expected to demo a product to a roomful of influential investors and journalists.

No pressure or anything.

Participants will tell you that StartupBus is the mother of all hackathons. You’re not just assessed on building a product, but also on your market vision and the traction you can generate.

Imagine building a real startup in a compressed time capsule traveling at 60 miles per hour.

It’s physically exhausting, mentally consuming, and it’s definitely not the most glamorous thing in the world.  You’re constantly outside of your comfort zone, never alone, and the experience is filled with moments of ambiguity and uncertainty. These constraints are intentional — the goal is to create a unique kind of experience that only certain personality types can thrive in.

The organization is run by alumni, and the energy and passion that goes into executing this event is directly transferred to the participants. The application process is no joke. You have to be referred by someone from a previous StartupBus trip, then you write up an application and get interviewed.

When I explain StartupBus to other people, it occurs to me we’re all a little crazy to try it. The premise doesn’t make any sense: building a technology product on the road from San Francisco to Austin with intermittent wifi. Ladies might not love the idea of spending the night in hotels sharing beds with teammates you just met. Wake up calls at the crack of dawn? As if launching a startup wasn’t already a crazy enough thing to do!

So why did I do it?

I had been working with the wrong cofounder on my startup and was in the process of figuring out next steps.  The timing seemed perfect and I had never been to the Austin-based tech conference SXSW, which StartupBus coincides with.  I figured it was the most productive use of my time and that I’d learn a lot along the way.

What I found interesting was that most people were in a similar position as me — they were experiencing inflection points both personally and professionally and trying to figure out next steps.

I’ve outlined the top five takeaways from my StartupBus experience below:

1. Discover new skills: Any experience that puts you outside your comfort zone will help uncover new aspects of yourself that you may not be aware of. I learned for instance that I am extremely good at performing in high pressure situations, pitching to investors, and am comfortable interviewing on camera. Had I not participated in StartupBus, I would have never been exposed to interviewing with press from all over the world or pitching ideas under the gun.
2. Make new friends: It’s always great to gain more experience with different team dynamics and working with strong personalities. The interaction of the StartupBus Alumni community is testament to how powerful this experience is in creating new relationships, it really is a global family. I’ve made some lifelong friendships on the bus and some participants ended up starting companies together. The possibilities are endless, you just have to be open to it.
3. Test your product ideas: If you have a few ideas that you’ve been brewing for years, StartupBus is the perfect environment to test them. Pitch an idea to the bus, and if you are successful in recruiting a team that believes in your vision, you’ll get a chance to experience building an MVP for real investors.
4. Disrupt your outlook: I wanted to come back from this experience with a perspective on what I should do next. If you’re going through a transition period and are trying to figure out what you’re passionate about, this environment will help you figure it out.
5. Be Open to Serendipity: There were plenty of moments during the journey when I had no idea where I was, where we were going, when we were stopping, and what would happen the next day — you learn to go with the flow. The value of SXSW is meeting new people and you need to make sure you’re open to that, and actively putting yourself in a position to have that happen.

The StartupBus environment provides a glimpse of what entrepreneurship is like without any of the risk or negative consequences. And like any experience, you will get out of it as much as you put in.

If this sounds like like the perfect match for you, we are inviting the first 50 VentureBeat readers to apply here. I will be the West Coast conductor, and we’ll set off to Austin on March 3rd.

Falon spends her time advising and consulting startups on everything from product development to launch strategy and is passionate about taking life changing technology mainstream. She was most recently was a Partner at MkII Ventures, had a failed dating startup, and was Head of Business Development for Firespotter Labs.

Falon began her career at Google at 19 and graduated from Santa Clara University with a BS in Finance and emphasis in Computer Engineering and Entrepreneurship.

In her 6+ years at Google, she developed her love and talent for sales strategy, operations, and business development while holding variety of roles across syndication partnerships, Google.org, and YouTube. You can subscribe to follow her updates at facebook.com/falonfatemi or follow her on twitter @falonfatemi.

Startup Bus image via Facebook

It’s 11 p.m., I’m drinking a can of Molson, and the bus passengers are finally quieting down as we get closer to New York City, where we departed two days ago. Many founders from promising early-stage startups from around the U.S. are sitting beside me as a type, trying to make sense of the past two days.

Let me back up for a second. On Wednesday morning, we took off for Montreal’s International Startup Festival, where the founders of these 14 startups got the chance to meet mentors, investors, and grandmas. To get back and forth to festival, the startups decided to brave a 7-hour bus ride on the “DOer Express” that was sponsored by well-funded developer-focused startups Twilio and SendGrid.

Twilio and SendGrid (with a little help from Microsoft) paid for the bus and hotel rooms for the startups. I suspect the two companies are doing this as a chance to develop potential paying customers in the future, but also get these startups to spread the gospel of SendGrid and Twilio. SendGrid says it’s an opportunity to give startups a chance they might not otherwise get and to build the community.

“This was organized because there are a bunch of startups — not just in New York, not just in San Francisco — and they don’t have the capital to tell the world how awesome they are,” Mike Swift, developer evangelist for SendGrid, told VentureBeat. “It’s a classic underdog story. These are people who didn’t get the chance, a lot are bootstrapped entirely. These people deserve it, and a lot of people don’t get that.”

The 14 startups on the bus were:

• ConnectCubed – Helps you get a job in the finance industry.
• CredoHealth – Private video chat between patients and health care professionals.
• FashionProject – Helping people donate clothes and earn money for non-profits.
• Fiestah – One-stop shop for party planning, including caterers and photographers.
• General Machines – Its Deatfel product hooks up the hard-of-hearing to others via phone.
• Gokrt – Online shopping cart for any site around the web.
• Kunvay – Easy way to transfer and receive ownership of creative work online.
• Review Trackers – Helps you monitor online reviews of your business or product.
• SlideSeed – SaaS that lets you create digital signage for you storefront.
• SplitWise – Helping you split your expenses smartly with friends and family.
• Tosigram – Making Terms of Service or Privacy Policy language easier to understand.
• Thryve – iPhone app that helps you eat healthier, not just count calories.
• Travtar – Travel search that compares hotels, hostels, short-term housing, and more.
• Wedgies – Simple online and SMS polling that can be spread via social media.

During the ride, each company above had the chance to give their pitches to everyone on the bus. Some had pitches with extra polish, while others stumbled over their words. It was a great chance to see people with different levels of skill and confidence about their products and services.

While in Montreal, the startup bus’ 30 or so passengers used their two days to see the city, eat unhealthy amounts of delicious poutine, and network like crazy. For companies that were from New York, it made sense to hop on the bus to scope out the Montreal scene, as well as see fascinating and funny speakers dole out inspiration.

“We wanted hear people’s feedback on our company,” New York-based Fiestah co-founder and COO Nurul Yahya said. “When you’re a startup, it’s a good thing to connect with other startups. When you go to a networking event, you get 5 minutes. Here, I’m on two six-hour bus rides and meeting 13 other startups.”

Other startups came from further away and paid for flights to get a spot on the startup bus, including San Francisco’s Gokrt and Las Vegas’ Wedgies. In Gokrt’s case, the company’s founder wanted to get advice and see how people would respond to his startup outside the Bay area.

“The thing about San Francisco is that it’s amazing for startups, but there is a lot of other stuff out there,” Gokrt founder Justin Johnson said. “It’s hard to leave it, but I’m happy to go to other events and connect.”

In the case of Wedgies, the company’s founders are fulfilling their “master goal of giving the entire world a Wedgie.” For them, it’s not only about creating “wedgie evangelists” but also telling the world about the Las Vegas tech scene.

“We made a lot of great new friends in Montreal and on the bus,” Jimmy Jacobson, CTO of Wedgies, said. “Being friendly to people close to you is more important than pitching people you have no connections to. We’re meeting people that normally wouldn’t have been available to us by being nice to everyone around us.”

During our journey back from Montreal, SendGrid purchased a few cases of beer to make the ride a bit more fun. But it wasn’t so much a party as it was a reflection period and a time to collaborate. People pulled out laptops and showed each other business plans, designs, and more, using each other as soundboards for success.

As the startup bus got closer to Manhattan, we could see the New York City skyline briefly. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the startup founders pop up from their half-asleep state and are ready to be finished with the journey. Consensus from talking with the riders suggests they are better off than they were two days ago, thanks to meeting other people that can become a support network for their dreams.

SendGrid’s Swift jumps on the microphone one last time to as we drive into the city to pass on encouraging words to the DOer Express:

“Stay in contact — there’s this thing called e-mail and you can circumvent the distance. I hope you got something out of it and got to refine your pitch. You had the chance to come up with this idea, and you know you’re building something awesome. The important part now is getting data points. Hopefully this was a chance for you to figure it out. Keeping doing what you’re doing.”

Photos: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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