There Is More Than One First Place

Google Cloud's ADK hackathon and its GKE Turns 10 hackathon both awarded a grand prize plus four regional winners — North America, Latin America, APAC and EMEA. That is at least five 'wins' per event. Taking the overall crown among 4,773 participants is brutal; taking your region is an order of magnitude easier.

Category prizes multiply the odds further. Solo.io's MCP hackathon crowned a winner in five separate tracks: Building Cool Agents, agentregistry, Starter, OSS Contribution and MCP Security & Governance. Microsoft's Agent Academy ran four tracks. GitLab handed out Most Technically Impressive, Most Impactful and a Green Agent Prize. The structure rewards being extreme on one axis even if you cannot win on all of them.

Takeaway: read the full prize list before you register, and decide which slot you can realistically reach the top three of — then pick what to build. If there is a starter track, a first-timer should aim there. If your strength is technical depth, target the technical prize and sharpen that one axis to an extreme. Spreading effort to score averagely everywhere is the hardest way to win anything.