Hackathon Company

I didn’t study CS in college, but I really wanted to learn how to make software. So, I learned by attending hackathons! My first hackathon was an online blockchain hackathon, where I teamed up with some friends from Blockchain at Berkeley and we won $5,000!

From there, I continued competing in hackathons, traveling across the world (Buenos Aires, Greece, New York, Singapore, and more), participating in dozens of hackathons. I loved it because I was learning how to code, having fun with friends, and making some nice cash while at it.

The opportunity to turn from a participant to a host came in my Freshman Fall, when I joined the first class of Anthropic Ambassadors at UC Berkeley. I put together the Claude Speedrun Hackathon in under 2 weeks, giving out $10k in cash/credits to 80+ Berkeley hackers. And I had a great time doing it :)

I continued hosting hackathons my sophomore year, hosting the 10^2 Hackathon with a16z/Polymarket/Cursor and Pi Day Hackathon with Coinbase/Solana/Ethereum. Between the two, we gave out $40,000 in cash to hackers.

Up until this point, none of these were under a particular brand, they were just one-off events.

Then, summer came around and I realized I had no idea what the fuck I wanted to do. I wanted to do my own thing, I just had no idea what. On a whim, I decided to post a tweet that I’m hosting a hackathon in New York for New York Tech Week. I had no sponsors, no venue, and no connections in New York.

And that’s how The Hackathon Company was born.

Since then: > Got sponsorships from ElevenLabs, Replit, Linq, Cursor, and more > Judges from YC, Foundation Capital, Z Fellows, Box Group, Cursor and more > Gave out over $100k to hackers > Hired a videographer and started making some fun videos showing the process :)

From hosting these events, I learned two key things.

1) It’s really important to have fun. So many hackathons I’ve competed in have been bland, homogenous, and uncreative. At my events I incentivize creativity as much as possible, giving tracks to the Most Creative and encouraging people to add their own twist to projects. Some people go the extra mile and bring their own hardware, like Meta Glasses or EEG Machines.

Sitting in a room coding all day can also get stale, so I always keep something fun for the winners, like throwing pies at them (for Pi Day) or throwing water balloons ;)

2) Software for the sake of software is boring. Agentic coding has unlocked so much potential for “non-technical” people to build cool shit. I’ve started reaching beyond regular hackathons and expanding into niches, like Robotics, Design, and Content Creation.

This stuff is really fun and I’m just getting started.