Startup Pitch Contest

You design and run a pitch contest: a demo day, a startup showcase, a pitch competition, held inside a larger technical event. It covers:

• Who gets on the stage.
• What they do once they are on it.
• Who judges, and on what.
• What a judge may do afterwards with a company they just watched.
• What the winner actually receives.

No build phase

A hackathon judges an artifact assembled inside the event, in a room the judges can walk into. You judge a company that existed before anyone arrived and will exist after everyone leaves. Three consequences run through every section:

1. Almost nothing that decides the result is observable in the slot. samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@hackathon-judging tells its reader to "Check the highest-weighted criterion is one a judge can actually observe in the slot." That instruction deletes most of a pitch rubric here. Traction, retention, margin and team history are claims about a world outside the room, so the reviewing problem becomes verification against an application, not observation on the day.
2. Readiness is a property of the applicant, not of the event. A hackathon can rescue an unfinished project with more hacking hours. Nothing makes a company more ready between the call closing and the stage, so everything that decides slate quality happens in the funnel.
3. Nothing here schedules a build, a venue for one, or mentors for one. There is no build phase, so there is no hand-off to make and no sibling skill owns one.

What you own, and what is already decided