Founders should avoid many of such events. It is waste time and money. I agree that founders should spend every extra dollar for marketing and customer acquisition.
Let me repeat this: in order to get cold, hard, cash, to create airbnb, airbnb founders sold cereal. A fast-moving consumer good.
Get money.
I'm not sure having several $100k to start, selling other stuff or pitching at disrupt are very good routes to startup success. The thing that seemed to work for Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft was building cool stuff first on almost zero budget.